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Aim and problem: Our aim with this study is to understand the dynamics on Colombian broadband market and the business opportunities arising from it. For that purpose we have formulated the following 3 research questions: 1) What characterizes the Colombian broadband market? 2) How can broadband contribute to development in Colombia? 3) Who benefits from business opportunities on the Colombian broadband market?   Method: The authors have chosen the qualitative study method in order to have better understanding, explanations and analysis of the problem. The collection of the empirical data has been conducted through interviews in Colombia.   Result & Conclusions: Research has shown that broadband  in Colombia is still under development and is present mainly in urban areas while rural areas still show a great lack of the service. Operators are offering triple play service which includes telephone, Internet and television at different speeds and prices.   The development of Broadband has a positive economic impact on the Colombian society and contributes to increase competitiveness and is a driving force for economic by stimulating productivity.   Suggestions for future research: The study has been limited to Colombian broadband market, the broadband technology and services based on broadband technology. The authors suggest for a future research to study how the expansion of broadband in rural areas in Colombia will affect the life and the businesses.   Contribution of the thesis: This study contributes to the understanding of the present situation of the broadband market in Colombia and the business opportunities open for vendors, operators and end users.

The specific purposes of this study were to determine: 1) the extent to which various categories of play were evident in a learning centers period in a first grade classroom: 2) whether specific activities and levels of play promoted various social groupings and levels of interaction: 3) whether the teacher's and children's perceptions of the program were similar. Data collected during a learning centers period in a self-contained first grade classroom (N=20) in southern Alberta. A target child procedure was used to observe individuals in order to record activities and language. Individual behaviours were then coded into task, social and language categories. As well, interviews with the children and teacher were conducted to obtain information regarding the perceptions of individuals about the program. In order to analyze the data, frequency tabulations were made of the number of activities contained in the 800 half-minute observation segments. These frequencies were then converted to levels of play in order to determine the range and relative frequencies of the various levels of play. Further analysis involved grouping social interactions into various levels in order that trends might be reported. Finally, the field notes from the interviews were analyzed in terms of themes in order that the perceptions of the teacher and children might be reported. The results of the study indicate that approximately 36% of the observed behaviours were considered play and that a significant proportion of the play was of the functional or constructive type. These lower levels of play accounted for the majority of the solitary and parallel social formations. The results of the study suggest implications for the range and choice of materials and activities which might be used to promote play as well as the role of the teacher in promoting play and facilitating play during the structured time. / 59 leaves, ; 28 cm

When children role play, they do things such as change their tone of voice or take on the character’s emotions or needs. These behaviours make it appear as though children adopt the mental perspective of the character they are pretending to be, which has led some researchers to argue that children “think-as-if” they are the character while role playing (e.g., Harris, 2000). However, it is questionable whether these sorts of behaviours can really be taken as strong evidence that children are “thinking-as-if”; children might simply be imitating the distinctive behavioural characteristics of the character they are pretending to be – or “behaving-as-if”. In two studies, I attempted to obtain better evidence that children “think-as-if” while role playing. To do this, I developed a novel paradigm called the Pretend Self-recognition (PSR) task that examines how children refer to photographs of themselves while they are pretending to be someone else. I reasoned that if children were truly “thinking-as-if”, they might see the photograph of themselves as a third person would, and thus refer to the photograph of themselves using their own proper name. In contrast, if children were simply "behaving-as-if", they might continue to refer to the photograph with the personal pronoun “me”. In Study 1, approximately half of 4-year-old children labeled their own photograph from the perspective of the character they were pretending to be, and thus showed evidence of "thinking-as-if". This finding was replicated when children were given the PSR task at two time points along with measures of theory of mind, executive functioning, pretense understanding, and narrative absorption. Results showed that PSR performance was stable across testing period, but was not related to any of the other constructs that were also measured. Taken together, the findings reported in this dissertation show that the PSR task is a reliable measure of perspective taking in role play, though the source of individual differences in the measure remains a target for future research. The lack of relation between individual differences might suggest that PSR performance is orthogonal to the other constructs and is something in its own right. / Thesis (Ph.D, Psychology) -- Queen's University, 2009-04-15 17:02:11.029

Object play is widely considered a primary medium through which children develop cognitive skills. In an attempt to examine the relative importance of different types of play experience and selected play components on children's subsequent approach to problem solving, 31 four-year-olds (19 boys, 12 girls) were matched on sex and PPVT-R raw score, and were then assigned to one of the three treatment groups. Seven triplets (5 male, 2 female) and five pairs (2 male, 3 female) of children were formed. Children in each group were exposed to a different type of experience relative to task-relevant materials (active play, passive observation of play, and no involvement) and subsequently given a lure-retrieval task. The solution to this task involved the joining of the two longest sticks with a block to produce a tool to retrieve a lure. Subjects were compared on their problem-solving performance as measured by solution time and specific object play components obtained in Cheyne and Rubin's (1983) study were replicated in this study. Examination of additional components in play indicated that problem solution was enhanced not only by frequent use of long double-stick construction, but also by double-stick constructions with any stick length. Problem-solving performance of the three groups of children were not significantly different. However, a Treatment x Sex interaction was noted among children in the active and passive groups; passive girls spent more time and tended to require more assistance to task solution than active girls, active boys, and passive boys. Factors which may have contributed to this finding are discussed.

The purpose of the study was to determine whether a significant correlation existed between group play and performance on a verbal intelligence test. In addition, the study was designed to test group play as a predictor of performance on a verbal intelligence test.The subjects of the study were kindergarten children enrolled at the Burris Laboratory School in Muncie, Indiana. All the children enrolled in either the morning or afternoon kindergarten program were considered to be included in the population sample but two restrictions eliminated some of the candidates. Those students who were non-white or absent for ten or more observations and/or school days were eliminated. A total of sixteen female and sixteen male students with the age range of sixty-two to seventy-seven months were used in this investigation.Two measuring instruments were used to collect data for the study. An observation instrument was developed from the Parent Social Play Scale to collect data that measured the number of group play episodes observed from each subject.A team of three observers were trained to use the observation instrument and a pilot study was conducted to establish the inter-rater reliability. By using Cohen's coefficient Kappa, it was established that the observation team had an interrater reliability of .99 when measuring between the two-part division of group play and non group play and an inter-rater reliability of .81 when measuring between all six types of social play. Twenty, thirty-second observations were made for each subject. Each observation was classified as one of the six social play types and then further categorized as non group play or group play. The final count included all group play observations for each subject.The other instrument used was the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test. This instrument provided an estimate of the verbal intelligence of each subject.The group play count, raw score from the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, sex, age, and number of siblings in the family of each subject were analyzed to test the following hypothesis at the .05 level of statistical significance: the partial correlation between group play and performance on a verbal intelligence test, partialling out the effects due to sex, age, and number of siblings in the family, is zero.The Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (the SPSS) program for multiple regression was used to test the 3 hypothesis. The value of the partial F ratio from the analysis of the data did not permit -the rejection of the hypothesis at an alpha level of .05. The partial correlation did not approach being significant and the proportion of the residual sum of squares that was accounted for by the addition of group play to the regression could not have been considered different from zero.The following conclusions may be drawn from the study: 1) group play explained very little of the variance in the scores on the verbal intelligence test, and 2) group play had little correlation with performance on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test when controlling for number of siblings in the family, age, and sex. Results of the study indicate that use of group play as a predictor or remediator of verbal intelligence is questionable.

Thesis PlanB (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Stout, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of Education, 1991. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 517-534).

Thesis (M.U.R.P. 1980) from the Department of Architecture, University of Adelaide.