Award-winning science author and Harvard professor Stephen Jay Gould shares some views on education and contemporary American culture. Gould's most enthusiastic school memory is singing in an all-city chorus. Harvard students are bright and motivated but have no shared culture, historical perspective, or foreign language proficiency. Gould favors…

Presents the development of a five-month on-line collaboration between Jenny Davis, a published writer, and eight junior high school girls at a Covington, Kentucky school. Describes the process of establishing rapport between author and students as she helped them with their writing. Provides excerpts of e-mail exchanges between the participants,…

Describes the scope of the Kentucky Authors Project, which involved 4th through 11th graders and 7 teachers at 5 Kentucky schools. Names the participating authors and schools. Presents lessons learned from the project and guidelines for assembling similar projects. (PA)

Discusses the work of children's author Alma Flor Ada, a Cuban native who has won awards honoring Latino writers and illustrators. Includes part of an interview that explores her background, describes activity ideas, and presents a bibliography of works written by her (several title published in both English and Spanish) as well as sources of…

This paper reports on analysis of three published texts attributed to a Finnish man with mental retardation and cerebral palsy using facilitated communication. Evaluation of the level of independence in writing, eye focus, reading ability, and controlled message passing concluded he was not the author of the texts. Discussion examines validation…

Discusses bibliometrics and its relationship to historical studies in order to examine community formation of scientific and scholarly communication through institutional affiliation. A history journal is investigated and reveals an institutional and geographical mapping of the contributors. (Author/LRW)

Summarizes Brock Cole's novel for young adolescents: "The Goats." Provides discussion questions and classroom activities in language arts, drama, research; mathematics, creative writing, similes; and presents an annotated bibliography of fiction for young adolescents dealing with runaways, self-reliance, family, friendship, courage, overweight,…

Queries Kingston about her fiction and nonfiction writing--her influences, how being Chinese American has shaped her, her thoughts about history, and her ideas on the writing process and on teaching. (PA)

Every two years, members of the Children's Libraries Section of the Greater St. Louis (Missouri) chapter of the Catholic Library Association publish a list of recommended books for young readers (K-8). Because it is a regional activity, special attention is given to St. Louis authors and Regina Medalists. Lists 36 titles and provides a brief…

Proposes a method for the comparative analysis of concentration in author productivity distributions; selects suitable measures, Gini's index and number of authors, for two viewpoints regarding productivity; discusses statistical peculiarities of author productivity data; and explains developmental profiles which take into account sample size…

Discusses Eric Lomax's autobiographical book "The Railway Man." Notes how it chronicles his boyhood obsession with train-spotting and the subsequent ways in which his life has been freaked by railway co-incidences. Describes how the author invited Eric Lomax to come and discuss this work with his students. (SG)

Recounts a conversation with author Ken Kesey. Describes a year-long graduate writing course in which Kesey and his students collaborated on a novel. Explains how the novel was written and how characters and plot were developed. Suggests that, if available to the class, computers would have simplified the writing. (SG)

Describes a study that examined patterns of collaborative authorship and professional affiliation of authors in major anthropology journals. The discussion covers parallels between these findings and the results of a citation analysis of the anthropology literature in terms of subdisciplinary and disciplinary interactions with other disciplines.…

Reports on an informal survey of writers from various contexts (including a textbook author, a novelist, and a cookbook author), describing their ideal writing environments. Discusses how computer technology can address some of the needs expressed by these writers. (MM)

Discovering that women are more heavily represented as journal authors than as members of graduate-program departments, questions whether funding might account for these patterns. Examines acknowledgment of support in published articles, finding no significant relationships among author gender, article topic, and notation of internal funding.…