Future integrated learning environments with multimedia

Abstract  Recent progress in information technology hardware and the spread of the Internet have opened a variety of new ways for many fields. Although slower than the business field to catch up with these new developments, the educational field has gradually migrated towards the World-wide web, mostly under the slogan of free, accessible education, to and from anyplace, at anytime. This development triggered an important shift from the teaching paradigm to the learning paradigm. However, slow network speed hindered the first learning environments from being more than simple, electronic text-books. The latest trends making use of increased bandwidths and integrating various media to enhance learning. Moreover, for obtaining learner-oriented, customised learning environ-ments, intelligent tutoring techniques are being adapted and developed for the web. This paper presents these trends on one hand, but on the other hand, also addresses the dangers and pitfalls that such an avalanche of change can bring and stresses the task of ensuring that the real goal of enhancing and improving learning is not overlooked.     

Dexamethasone induces chondrogenesis in organoid culture of cell mixtures from mouse embryos

Previous studies have shown that verbal processing in both normal individuals and a split-brain patient can be strongly affected by the semantic category of an unattended word presented to the left visual field (LVF). The effect was interpreted in terms of inhibition, since responses were slower when the unattended LVF word belonged to the same category as the target word. The present experiment discriminated between two alternative explanations for this finding. Subjects were presented with two letter strings, one in central vision and one to the left or right of centre. Subjects made a speeded lexical decision to the central string, and were instructed to ignore the lateral string. When a word was presented to the LVF subjects responded more slowly when it was semantically related to the central word. When an unattended word was presented to the RVF, its semantic relationship to the central word had no effect on decision latency. This finding is discussed in relation to views of performance laterality and selective attention.