| Product Name: |
Exploring Perception |
| Level: |
First Year Tertiary / Second Year Tertiary |
| Platform: |
Macintosh® / PC - Windows® |
| Supplied Information: |
An exciting solution: an interactive CD-ROM that allows professors to demonstrate, and students to dynamically explore - how perceptual principles actually work.
As a teaching aid, the CD-ROM gives instructors an alternative to the cumbersome and time-consuming task of bringing in equipment like slide projectors or three-dimensional objects in order to meaningfully illustrate how perceptual principles work. Using the power of the computer, instructors can demonstrate key principles in class, then assign certain modules or interactions for students to explore independently.
A Modular Organization
The CD-ROM includes 7 modules, each consisting of 8 units, which in turn consist of 6 interactions. The individual interactions cover such topics as:
- Psychophysics: Measuring Sensory Experience; Physiological Bases of Perception; Perceiving Colour; Perceiving Form, Pattern, and Movement; Perceiving Depth, Size, Lightness, and Contrast; Perceiving Sound, Speech, and Music; and, Perceptual Constancy and Adaptation and include: 100 very simple "click and show" interactions ; 55 complex "click and show" interactions; 35 extended "click and show" interactions; 98 interactions that require active participation and synthesis and more intensive engagement by the learner.
Features
- All interactions on the CD-ROM require student participation (versus just observation).
- Students may be asked to test a concept, such as "which is bigger, which is brighter?", or may be asked to make a prediction about what they think will happen.
- Students may be asked to collect data and then compare their results either to the norm or to the classic findings of that experiment.
- Organized from the simple to the more complex, the CD-ROM is designed to work effectively with a wide range of schools and students.
- A demo track (called "The Organizer") allows instructors to organize a number of demonstrations to show in class before they send students off to the laboratory to work on their own.
- A guided tour gives users an overview of the various functions and parts of the program.
- A progress record can be maintained by students to detail their progress through the program; an instantaneous "search and review" feature gives students immediate feedback.
- Approximately 900 questions within the interactions both engage the user and allow the interaction to 'click in' .
Site license includes student package + Instructor's Notes. The Instructor's Notes manual includes information on how to integrate the CD-ROM with Goldstein's Sensation and Perception, Fourth Edition, as well as other core texts. It also suggests activities for students to complete in laboratory and to hand in for credit or extra credit.
"Smart-Pak" discount package: Goldstein's Sensation and Perception, Fourth Edition packaged with Ryan's Exploring Perception at a special discount price for students: $104.50 (ISBN: 0-534-33176-9). |
| Possible Use: |
This product is suitable for First Year Tertiary / Second Year Tertiary courses for use by students without supervision. |
| Price: |
Site license: US$700.00 plus US$35.00 per CPU. Student single copy: US$72.00 (CD-ROM packaged in the back of an 88-page paperbound book.) |
| Developer/s: |
Colin Ryan, James Cook University of North Queensland |
| Review: |
This excellent introductory course, suitable for unsupervised use by students, or as supporting material in lectures, covers most of the major areas and issues in perception. It has five general-topic modules of eight units each, and each of these units has six interactive screens (actually called "interactions") associated with it; a total of 240. Each interactive screen has an excellent, usually active, visual, with a controllable introductory voice-over (available as a text window), and abundant text information attached to the visual itself. Each of the interactive screens has an associated window with a few test-questions.
There is also a neat glossary function which lets the user check up on unfamiliar terms, and a sort of diary system which lets the user keep track, using their individual floppy disk, of which topics they have already visited - necessary, since the order in which the topics are traversed is completely flexible. For the teacher, this same system makes it possible to set up a sequence in which the screeens should be accessed, which can then be run like a slide show.
The accompanying manual is clear and comprehensive.
The faults of the package are trivial compared to its virtues. A final editing run would have eliminated the occasional editing glitch, chiefly wrong commas and occasional usage errors (e.g., "begs the question" for "raises the question"). On the screen, some slider controls go in counter-intuitive directions, sometimes buttons have to be clicked two or three times before they do their thing, and it would have been better for secondary windows to have had their own close-boxes, instead of requiring the calling-button to be clicked again before they would depart. However, this is, overall, one of the best teaching CD-ROMs I have encountered.
|
|
Peter Delin, Department of Psychology,
University of Adelaide,
August 1998
|
Other references
to this product: |
UniServe*Science News, Vol. 2 November 1995 (available online at http://www.usyd.edu.au/su/SCH/newsletter/vol2/ryan.html).
Additional review can be found at
http://www.york.ac.uk/inst/ctipsych/web/CTI/DirTxt/reviews/Explor.html
Psychology Software News, v 8 , November 1997, p 15 |
| |
| Supplier: |
Brooks/Cole Publishing Company, 511 Forest Lodge Road, Pacific Grove, CA 93950-5098, USA |
|
info@brookscole.com
|
|
http://www.brookscole.com/ |
|
phone: (408) 373 0728 |
|
fax: (408) 375 6414 |
| Date Record Last Modified: |
1/10/98 |
