Newspaper

The paper deals with daily print media coverage of climate change in the Czech Republic in time period 1997–2010. Together 5663 articles from six countrywide daily newspapers, including four prestige-press, one tabloid and one political party affiliated newspapers, were chosen for the content analysis focused on the intensity of media coverage. Several categories were also observed, with special attention
to the quality of information and its possible consequences. This study is the first long-term content analysis of media depiction of climate change in the Czech news. The results show that intensity of media attention in the Czech newspapers is similar to other EU or US daily newspapers. Regarding the observed categories, the articles in Czech papers mostly do not refer to scientific sources of information, focus more on the natural issues than social ones and equally link the climate change topics to the Czech Republic and global issues. Most of the articles can be labelled as catastrophic or sensational, only 11 % of them are serious, i.e. not stressing the sensation or catastrophes and referring to some source of
information. With respect to this problematic quality of information we discuss previous studies dealing with the effect of information form on the recipients. Despite the fact, that people perceive the media in various ways, some studies show that catastrophic messages can increase the climate scepticism and undermine the willingness to act in some mitigation processes. We argue that the style of media coverage can influence public perception of climate change, which could partially explore, why the Czech population belongs to those more sceptical among the EU.

Bank Street College of Education he research presented here began several years ago when a group of us at Bank Street's Center for Children and Technology set out to investigate a range of issues around gender and technology. As part of that research, we speculated that the activity of design was a promising way to support alternative pathways for girls into the world of technology (Brunner, Hawkins, & Honey, 1988). The developmental and educational psychology literatures offer robust evidence that a richer understanding of a task is developed when children actively construct their own knowledge (Dewey, 1933; Piaget, 1972). In his book, Knowledge as Design, David Perkins (1986) suggests that the act of designing facilitates the constructive and creative use of knowledge by the designer. The work that Seymour Papert and his colleagues at M.I.T. have undertaken on LEGO/Logo indicates that design is a powerful way to engage learners in making deep "cognitive connections with the mathematical and scientific concepts that underlie the domain in which they are designing" (Resnick & Ocko, 1990, p. 122). The LEGO/Logo researchers also found that, as an activity, design has the added benefit of helping students acquire a rich sense of achievement and purpose. At the start of our research, we hypothesized that through the activity of design, "it may be possible to develop situations in which technology comes alive for girls, where they are invited to engage in a new kind of conversation with materials and ideas in constructing artifacts" (Brunner, Hawkins, & Honey, 1988, p. 11). Our gender research also began with certain suppositions about the nature of technology. In our view, there are specific discursive practices that have grown up around technology that need to be unpacked if we are to understand the social and psychological dimensions of engaging with technological objects. For example, there is a world of culturally produced meaning associated with technology. A recent article by Paul Edwards (1990) makes the point that "computer work is more than just a job. It is a major cultural practice, a large scale social form that has created and reinforced modes of thinking, systems of interaction,