This paper is a keynote speech delivered at the National Symposium of Early Childhood Education) held by the Ministry of Education, December 16-19, 2004. In this paper, Jiang Jin first analyzed the difficulties and challenges that China faced in the development of early childhood education (ECE), including the partially dissolved ECE system,…

African higher education is currently facing tremendous challenges. The pressure and demand for access is huge. This is understandable against the background of traditionally low participation, low success and throughput rates, declining financial contributions from governments and donors, and critical pressures for efficiency, modernization,…

Course management systems (CMSs) are software systems designed to manage course content and course activities. These tools integrate technological and pedagogical features into a web-based system that allows instructors, even those who are unfamiliar with web-based technologies, to design, deliver, and manage an online course. However, CMSs have…

Purpose: The purpose of this research is to study the influence of five critical factors on service quality in the insurance sector. Having studied the influence of these critical factors, an attempt has been made to obtain a generic solution to enhance the quality of service by proposing a holistic framework of learning organization. As…

Women are at a disadvantage under both Social Security and private employee pension plans because the retirement systems were set up at a time when most women were non-working spouses of employed men, a condition that no longer exists. Today women workers, divorcees, and widows of retirees often find themselves with inadequate retirement benefits…

Parent involvement is recognized as an important factor in encouraging student achievement. However, a survey by the National Center for Education Statistics found that in public schools with 25 percent or more American Indian students, teachers identified lack of parent involvement as one of their schools' three most serious problems. At an…

This article reports on the findings of a research study that was conducted to explore the types of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in use in higher education in South Africa. Specifically, the goal of the study was to explore how e-learning is being used for teaching and learning purposes. Data were collected from interviews with…

Whereas the penetration of mobile phones in Asian countries keeps climbing, little research has explored the application of the short message service (SMS) in second language learning. This study aims to examine the effectiveness of SMS vocabulary lessons of limited lexical information on the small screens of mobile phones. Thirty high school…

Staff shortages and high service ideals collided when the Iowa State University Parks Library recognized its need to find an alternative to the human-conducted tour for various groups of library users, including hundreds of non-native speakers of English who arrived at the school to enter a degree program. An audiocassette taped tour was developed…

A study examined behaviors of participants trained in a nonadversarial model of contract negotiation, focusing on possible influences of formal and informal power structures, written and unwritten rules, and firmly entrenched adversarial behavior on the bargaining process. Participants were representatives of a district's teacher union and board…

There is as yet no viable long-term strategy to ensure that digital information will be readable in the future. Digital documents are vulnerable to loss via the decay and obsolescence of the media on which they are stored, and they become inaccessible and unreadable when the software needed to interpret them, or the hardware on which that software…

Describes the development of transportation historically and the problems solved as well as created. (BR)

The pilot study reported here applies content analysis techniques to twenty interviews carried out in preparation for mediated searches as part of the "Uncertainty in Information Seeking" project. The tools used in the analysis (Atlas.ti and TEXTStat) are described and their contribution assessed. TEXTStat, a free program, was used to…

This paper discusses problems with information systems and services, particularly those relating to information on science and technology, in third world countries: (1) problems in collection development; (2) financial problems, including legal and political constraints; (3) a low degree of scientific literacy; (4) communication barriers; (5) lack…

This paper explores the conceptual aspect of educational technology, identifies recurring limitations of instructional technologies often overlooked by their proponents, and examines the politics of and barriers to educational innovation, particularly in the field of computer assisted instruction (CAI). It is noted that, despite glowing…