Designing computer-based learning environments must account for the context in which activity occurs, the tasks that students perform, and the tools that facilitate these tasks. When designing for school use, it is also crucial to consider how the software will be integrated into the organization of the classroom workplace and how teacher practices influence the adoption and success of interactive learning environments. This paper discusses our experiences in designing and deploying an interactive video tool to high school classrooms. We stress a classroom-centered design that tries to integrate usable software with interactions that occur "outside of the box" to alter traditional school learning. Keywords Children, collaborative learning, educational applications, interaction design, multimedia, social issues, video.

Nature documentaries play an important role in high school biology classrooms, yet they deliver a passive and biased account of the behavior of organisms. To engage students in more active problem solving around behavioral topics, we created an interactive video system called Animal Landlord. Part of a week-long curriculum designed to introduce concepts in behavioral ecology, Animal Landlord presents film clips of the Serengeti lion hunting its prey. Students select and annotate video frames with explanations of their significance to the hunt, compare annotations across films, and ultimately generalize a qualitative model of predation behaviors. This paper discusses the motivations for changing the nature of documentary use in the classroom, the ways in which we change the form of traditional narration for pedagogical purposes, and the interactivity that emerges in the social context of the classroom.

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We describe a learning environment for high school biology called BGuILE that engages students in scientific investigations in which they can explore interesting problems in evolution and ecology. The environment supports productive inquiry by two interrelated means. First, the system structures students' investigations, encouraging them to compare competing hypotheses, articulate predictions, and record interpretations according to specific task models of biological inquiry. Second, the system provides a context for collaboration in which the biological task model is used to drive the content of students' discussions. Keywords --- microworlds, simulation, tools for inquiry learning. 1. Science learning through inquiry Science education reformers argue that students should be active learners, directing their inquiry to construct and evaluate explanations, building upon their prior conceptions [1, 2]. Fostering scientific inquiry requires more support than providing opportunities for...

Vocal learning is well known among passerine and psittacine birds, but most data on mammals are equivocal. Speci¢c bene¢ts of vocal learning are poorly understood for most species. One case where vocal learning should be favoured by selection is where calls indicate group membership and group mates are unrelated. Female greater spear-nosed bats, Phyllostomus hastatus, live in stable groups of unrelated bats and use loud, broadband calls to coordinate foraging movements of social group mates. Bats bene¢t from group foraging. Calls di¡er between female social groups and cave colonies, and playback experiments demonstrate that bats perceive these acoustic di¡erences. Here I show that the group distinctive structure of calls arises through vocal learning. Females change call structure when group composition changes, resulting in increased similarity among new social group mates. Comparisons of transfers with agematched half-sibs indicate that call changes are not simply due to maturation, the physical environment or heredity.These results suggest that studies testing vocal learning in mammals could pro¢t by focusing onvocalizations that signify group membership.

doi:10.1006/anbe.2001.1692, available online at

In a wide variety of animal species, females produce vocalizations just before, during, or immediately after copulation. Observational and experimental evidence indicates that these copulation calls are sexually selected traits, functioning to promote competition between males for access to the calling female. In this paper, we present an acoustic analysis of variation in the form of copulation calls of female yellow baboons, Papio cynocephalus cynocephalus. In particular, we examine whether information about three factors—the calling female’s reproductive state, the occurrence or absence of ejaculation, and the dominance rank of the mating male—is encoded in call structure and hence is potentially available to male receivers attending to the signal. Although several features of copulation calls were correlated with each of these factors, when all three were included in multiple regressions only reproductive state and rank of the mating male had independent effects on call form. These findings indicate that female copulation calls in this species signal information about the proximity to ovulation of the calling female and also the relative competitive strength of her mating partner. Am. J. Primatol. 56:43–

This paper describes an approach to using photographs and video as a primary data source for observational inquiry. We describe a framework for students to collaborate around photographs and video, collaboration that leads to inquiry and the development of explanatory models. We also describe two of our learning environments to illustrate how students can begin to develop predictive theories from image data