A Distant Technology

Throughout Disney's phenomenally successful run in the entertainment industry, the company has negotiated the use of cutting-edge film and media technologies that, J. P. Telotte argues, have proven fundamental to the company's identity. Disney's technological developments include the use of stereophonic surround sound for Fantasia, experimentation with wide-screen technology, inaugural adoption of three-strip Technicolor film, and early efforts at fostering depth in the animated image. Telotte also chronicles Disney's partnership with television, development of the theme park, and depiction of technology in science-fiction narratives. An in-depth discussion of Disney's shift into digital filmmaking with its Pixar partnership and an emphasis on digital special effects in live-action films, such as the Pirates of the Caribbean series, also highlight the studio's historical investment in technology. By exploring the technological context for Disney creations throughout its history, The Mouse Machine illuminates Disney's extraordinary growth into one of the largest and most influential media and entertainment companies in the world. Hardbook is unjacketed.

Science fiction films celebrate and critique the impact of a burgeoning technology on the world's cultural, political, and social milieu. The Machine Age, roughly delineated by the two decades between World Wars, was a watershed period during which modern society entered into an ambiguous embrace with technology that continues today. J. P. Telotte carefully blends film, technology, cultural, and genre studies to illuminate this nearly forgotten era in our cinematic history and to show, through analysis of classics like The Invisible Ray, Metropolis, and Things to Come, how technology played a major role as motif, "actor," and producer. What he also discovers as he ranges among the American, British, Russian, French, and German science fiction cinema — as well as mainstream films, figures, and cultural products such as the New York World's Fair — is a fundamental ambivalence, embedded in the films themselves, about the very machine-age ethos they promoted. Even as advances in the technical apparatus of filmmaking elevated it from mere entertainment to a medium of general communication and genuine artistic expression, Machine Age science fiction films remained curiously distant from and often skeptical of the very machines on which their narratives focus. The resulting tensions, Telotte writes, "thus seem to intersect with those implicit in a Western world that was struggling with its own transition into the modern," rendering the films' task inevitably paradoxical and difficult

Maps poised at the intersection of art, architecture, activism, and geography trace a profound shift in our understanding and experience of space. The maps in this book are drawn with satellites, assembled with pixels radioed from outer space, and constructed from statistics; they record situations of intense conflict and express fundamental transformations in our ways of seeing and of experiencing space. These maps are built with Global Positioning Systems (GPS), remote sensing satellites, or Geographic Information Systems (GIS): digital spatial hardware and software designed for such military and governmental uses as reconnaissance, secrecy, monitoring, ballistics, the census, and national security. Rather than shying away from the politics and complexities of their intended uses, in Close Up at a Distance Laura Kurgan attempts to illuminate them. Poised at the intersection of art, architecture, activism, and geography, her analysis uncovers the implicit biases of the new views, the means of recording information they present, and the new spaces they have opened up. Her presentation of these maps reclaims, repurposes, and discovers new and even inadvertent uses for them, including documentary, memorial, preservation, interpretation, political, or simply aesthetic. GPS has been available to both civilians and the military since 1991; the World Wide Web democratized the distribution of data in 1992; Google Earth has captured global bird's-eye views since 2005. Technology has brought about a revolutionary shift in our ability to navigate, inhabit, and define the spatial realm. The traces of interactions, both physical and virtual, charted by the maps in Close Up at a Distance define this shift.

Highlighted are the pedagogical, organizational, cultural, social, and economic factors that influence the adoption and integration of emerging technologies in distance education. Advice is offered on how educators can launch effective and engaging distance education initiatives, in response to technological advancements, changing mindsets, and economic and organizational pressures.

This book, first published in 1984, provides a comprehensive review of the range of technology that was being used in distance education. Technological developments in word processing, video-disc and viewdata as well as computer-based learning had revolutionised the potential for distance education. These developments required the role of more ’conventional’ distance learning media, such as broadcasting, tuition and text, to be reassessed. This book, written by international experts in the field, explored the state of the art at the time, and also provided their ideas on how future developments were likely to evolve. This book is ideal for those studying education and communications.

"This book reviews distance learning programs and software systems, outlining computational methods, algorithms, implemented prototype systems, and applications of open and distance learning"--Provided by publisher.

Online Distance Education: Towards a Research Agenda offers a systematic overview of the major issues, trends, and areas of priority in online distance education research. In each chapter, an international expert or team of experts provides an overview of one timely issue in online distance education, summarizing major research on the topic, discussing theoretical insights that guide the research, posing questions and directions for future research, and discussing the implications for distance education practice as a whole. Intended as a primary reference and guide for distance educators, researchers, and policymakers, Online Distance Education addresses aspects of distance education practice that have often been marginalized, including issues of cost and economics, concerns surrounding social justice, cultural bias, the need for faculty professional development, and the management and growth of learner communities. At once soundly empirical and thoughtfully reflective, yet also forward-looking and open to new approaches to online and distance teaching, this text is a solid resource for researchers in a rapidly expanding discipline.

Often the switch to telecare--technology used to help caretakers provide treatment to their patients off-site--is portrayed as either a nightmare scenario or a much needed panacea for all our healthcare woes. This widely researched study probes what happens when technologies are used to provide healthcare at a distance. Drawing on ethnographic studies of both patients and nurses involved in telecare, Jeannette Pols demonstrates that instead of resulting in less intensive care for patients, there is instead a staggering rise in the frequency of contact between nursing staff and their patients. Care at a Distance takes the theoretical framework of telecare and provides hard data about these innovative care practices, while producing an accurate portrayal of the pros and cons of telecare.