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Exploring the Impacts of
Pervasive Computing |
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by Scott Tilley
For the past 12 years the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE) has sponsored a conference on educational multimedia, hypermedia, and telecommunications called ED-MEDIA. This year's event was held in Montréal, Canada from June 26 to July 1. As befits such a broad range of topics, the ED-MEDIA conference is multi-disciplinary in nature. Many of the 1,200 attendees (who come from over 50 countries) are educators involved in K-12 teaching, university research, or institutional learning.
The ED-MEDIA Program Committee consists of about 65 international experts. The conference Proceedings are now so large that they are only distributed on CD-ROM; the printed Proceedings consists solely of abstracts and author information for the approximately 600 papers included. Having been involved in conference management myself in the past, but on a much smaller scale, I congratulate the ED-MEDIA committee for putting together such an interesting event. Sessions of InterestThere are a great many activities underway in parallel at ED-MEDIA; so many in fact that it is virtually impossible to attend even a quarter of them. For each 60-minute session there are 12 rooms in use, each with 2 or 3 presenters. The scope of the conference includes the following major topics as they relate to the educational and developmental aspects of multimedia/hypermedia and telecommunications:
All sessions are indexed in the Final Program using one of the six acronyms listed above. For example, one paper session I attended under the INFR rubric was called "Web Raveler: An Infrastructure for Transforming Hypermedia," by Samuel Rebelsky of Grinnell College. The Web Raveler project is building a framework for transforming the content of Web pages on the fly. The novelty of their approach is that the transformation is done by the user, not by the author, so that the form (and even content) of a Web page can be changed quite dramatically depending on requirements. For example, displaying Web pages that are rich in graphics on a text-only pager. As the presenter said, "... high-end users now have low-end computers," referring to the proliferation of Web-enabled PDAs and cellular telephones. Another session of interest was presented by Steven Mills of the University of Kansas on "Unlocking the Gates of the Kingdom: Designing Web Sites for Accessibility." (There was also a tutorial on this topic by the same presenter earlier in the week, but I was unable to attend.) I found this presentation particularly interesting because it addressed what I think is an understated problem: the inability of the disabled to fully make use of the Web. For example, sites that rely heavily on animation and graphics can be wonderful to see, but for someone who is vision-impaired, a site that lacks a text-only version is nearly useless. I applaud the presenter for continuing to work on this problem and only wish more Web site developers would keep the W3C's accessibility guidelines in mind. Copyrights and CoursesOne thread that seemed to run through the conference was the perceived commercialization of education. Distance learning is of course a very hot topic right now, and it was discussed at length at ED-MEDIA. There is a growing trend for North American and European universities to license course material for delivery in other parts of the world. An important question for the content developers in this situation is who owns the copyright to the material? In academia, it's common for professors to retain the copyright on course material they develop. But when the material is licensed for use abroad, or for asynchronous delivery by the same professor but to students at different institutions, the question becomes more complicated. Several organizations have been formed to address this very topic, and the large number of new "virtual" or online universities attest to the fact that there is an increasing demand for distance learning. There is little doubt that the power of the personal computer, coupled with the Internet and the Web, continues to have a dramatic affect on education. Some people feel that existing courseware can be packaged for use on the Web, with little interaction with instructors, and still deliver a quality educational experience. I find this notion both naive and somewhat dangerous. There is far more to learning that just reading PowerPoint slides on the Web -- as many of my own students can attest! Final Comments and PhotosThis was the first ED-MEDIA conference I have attended, and I enjoyed my short time there. The following photographs were taken with an inexpensive digital camera. The quality is so-so, but the pictures do give a sense of the ED-MEDIA activities. To truly appreciate the efforts of the conference organizers and the many excellent presentations, I would suggest spending at least 3 days at the event. In fact, you can mark your calendars now for June 25-30, 2001, when ED-MEDIA'2001 will be held in Tampere, Finland. I'm told that summer in the Nordic countries are wonderful. | ||||||
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This year's ED-MEDIA conference was held in Montréal,
Canada. The
conference focuses on the use of multimedia technology in education. It's an
event that attracts over 1,200 attendees (who come from over 50 countries)
involved in K-12 teaching, university research, or institutional learning.
This was my
first time at ED-MEDIA, and I found the sessions to be very interesting. A common
thread throughout the conference was distance learning and the many issues surrounding
moving instructional material online.
I was fortunate enough to
spend a few days at ED-MEDIA, sitting in on paper presentations, listening to
researchers and vendors describe their latest work at the poster/demo sessions,
and talking with conference organizers. In speaking with Jacqueline Bourdeau of
the University of Québec at Montréal, one of the two Program Co-Chairs of the
conference, I was impressed with the sheer scale of the conference. Virtually
the entire Sheraton Hotel was taken over by ED-MEDIA attendees, sporting flashy
red badges and carrying the ubiquitous black bags that are so common at all
conferences now.
