Fire is a challenge in the wildland-urban interface. Although resource managers encourage residents to create defensible space, many do not. This study illustrates the value of using a needs assessment to better understand perceptions of an audience in order to develop meaningful messages and materials. In this case, our audience is residents of…

Evaluation units found in large organizations confront a number of impediments to the use of their findings and recommendations. These derive from both the formal roles they play and their own operating styles and processes. Drawing on experience at the U.S. General Accounting Office and the World Bank, this paper suggests that to improve the…

Intended for researchers and students in mass media theory, this paper examines the development of the concept of meaning in media studies. It considers the epistemological and sociological roots of the concept, arguing that such an analysis is pivotal in understanding the differences in current research perspectives. The notion of meaning in…

The National Writing Project designed the Professional Writing Retreats to support writing by teacher-leaders for audiences of scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and other members of the public who have an interest in education. These writing retreats focus on writing about the profession of teaching, giving teachers a chance to write about…

Communications and mainstream media are entering a new age of on-demand content. As digital video recorders, like TiVo, change how we watch television, podcasts are taking the spoken word in its own on-demand direction. Astronomy podcasts allow listeners to get up-to-date content on a variety of topics ranging from what's in the sky to what's in…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to call attention to the fact that conferences for professionals rely on massive one-way communication and hence produce little learning for delegates--and to introduce an alternative, the "learning conference", that involves delegates in fun and productive learning processes.…

The following is a translation of the introduction to "Medabrim Chazon" (Jerusalem: Keter, 2006), the Hebrew translation of "Visions of Jewish Education," edited by Seymour Fox, Israel Scheffler, and Daniel Marom (Cambridge, 2003). "Visions of Jewish Education" is an effort by leading scholars to improve the quality…

This chapter explains how the show "The Avengers," a popular British television program with an unusual female lead role, captured the imagination of women viewers in England from 1962 to 1964. After describing the show and then the research project investigating viewers' responses to it, this chapter explores the experience of watching…

Different speakers may pronounce the same sounds very differently, yet listeners have little difficulty perceiving speech accurately. Recent research suggests that listeners adjust their preexisting phonemic categories to accommodate speakers' pronunciations ("perceptual learning"). In some cases, these adjustments appear to reflect general…

Women's colleges in the 1970s and 1980s faced highly uncertain futures. Soaring popularity of coeducation left them with serious enrollment downturns, and challenges from proposed equal rights legislation threatened to render illegal their single-sex admissions policies. These perilous external conditions drew together the presidents of U.S.…

In this article, the author examines how activist media by Native AIDS organizers promoted anticolonial analyses of AIDS, gender, and sexuality as a contribution to scholarship on Native responses to AIDS. His discussion centers on the organizers who created media as authorities on and in their media. In contrast to recent accounts that popularize…

Focusing on periodicals that consistently carry materials about reading, this contributor's guide presents 2 lists of information on 198 journals, magazines, newsletters, newspapers, and yearbooks. Every periodical included appears alphabetically on each of the two lists. The first list offers information about editor, address, and editorial…

Focusing on periodicals that consistently carry materials about reading, this contributor's guide presents two lists of information on 215 journals, magazines, newsletters, newspapers, and yearbooks. Every periodical included appears alphabetically on each of the two lists. The first list offers information about editor, address, and editorial…

The purpose of this report is to identify changes in the radio environment, especially those which affect public radio's ability to compete. In Boston and other markets around the country, most formats have subdivided into targeted niches. The effect has been to even out station shares, so that rather than trying to reach mass audiences,…

Although many campus radio stations try to copy or emulate their commercial counterparts, determining who is listening to the station is often difficult. It is not odd for stations to undertake in-house listener surveys, which are often conducted by classes studying audience research. Results of the 1995 College Radio Survey highlight significant…