A study of the effectiveness of music appreciation TV programs for young children in Hong Kong

This paper provides a preliminary report of a small-scale research examining the effectiveness of a series of Music Appreciation segments of “Pre-school: Learn to Fly”—a locally designed and produced early childhood TV program in Hong Kong. Four aspects of young children’s musical development were studied: 1) musical exposure; 2) attention span; 3) response to music; and 4) musical memory. The findings enrich local understanding of early childhood music education and media, and provide more information for the production of the next series from late 2004.

Strategic leadership of teaching and learning centres : from reality to ideal

This paper reports on the third phase of a study of Australian Teaching and Learning Centres to identify factors that contribute to the effective strategic leadership of Centres. Focus groups at 10 Australian universities included 66 respondents, providing a diverse range of perspectives, from students to members of the university executive. Analysis of participant contributions extended findings from prior project phases and the wider literature. They also contributed to the final construction of the strategic leadership Teaching and Learning Centre maturity framework presented here. Centres remain in a state of flux, enduring regular reconfiguration. For most Centres, their level of interaction with students is low and increased engagement with students would be of benefit. Perceptions of Centres vary widely, reinforcing the importance of a strategic partnership between the University’s Senior Executive, the Centre and faculties as a prerequisite for implementing identified high-impact strategies for improvement in teaching and learning.

Constructing Australia : a companion to the ABC TV series

This engaging collection tells the story of how three of Australia's greatest man made-icons were built. The making of the Harbour Bridge, the creation of the Telegraph Line across Australia and the building of the pipeline from Perth to Kalgoolie.

Virtual reality interaction techniques

This paper addresses the problems associated with interaction in immersive virtual reality and makes recommendations as to how best to deal with these problems, thereby producing a usable virtual reality interactive environment. Immersive virtual reality means that the users are immersed or contained inside the environment in which they are working. For example, they are able to turn their heads and look around, as well as use their bodies to control the system.

The work in progress involves a study of various virtual reality input devices, some designed and implemented as part of the project. Additionally, the paper describes a simple framework for separation of the interaction and application parts of a virtual reality system in order to facilitate an object oriented approach to the implementation of the recommendations, and to the building of future virtual reality applications which incorporate these ideas.

A generic virtual reality interaction system and its extensions using the common object request broker architecture (CORBA)

The paper describes the design and implementation of an immersive Virtual Reality (VR) interaction system. The system aims to provide a flexible mechanism for programmers to implement interaction in their VR applications, making good use of all accepted practices in the field. The paper further describes how the system was extended to a multi-user system using the CORBA middleware layer.

Realistic autonomous fish for virtual reality

We create realistic autonomous fish for Virtual Reality systems. The fish are realistic in appearance, movement and behaviour: the swimming behaviour being non-scripted, within real time rendering.The form of the fish is procedurally created. The size and shape of the form are controlled by a number of variables which are stored in a simple ASCII file. This allows efficient creation of different fish at run time.The behaviour is obtained by implementing a flocking algorithm.

Experiences in porting a virtual reality system to Java

Practical experience in porting a large virtual reality system from C/C++ to Java indicates that porting this type of real-time application is both feasible, and has several merits. The ability to transfer objects in space and time allows useful facilities such as distributed agent support and persistence to be added. Reflection and type comparisons allow flexible manipulations of objects of different types at run-time. Native calls and native code compilation reduce or remove the overhead of interpreting code.Problems encountered include difficulty in achieving cross-platform code portability, limitations of the networking libraries in Java, and clumsy coding practices forced by the language.

Building the second generation of parallel/distributed virtual reality systems

We present the RhoVeR (Rhodes Virtual Reality) system and classify it as a second generation parallel/distributed virtual reality (DVR) system. We discuss the components of the system and thereby demonstrate its support for virtual reality application development, its configurable, parallel and distributed nature, and its synthesis of first generation DVR techniques.

Rhetoric and reality : an examination of performance management in Australian universities

This paper reports on a survey of academics in the Business School of four Australian universities and explores their attitudes to performance management in general and their experience of performance management in their own university. Results indicate an apparent disconnect between the rhetoric of performance management and the reality being experienced in universities.