Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia Division News --------------------------------------------------- Contents: 1. ED-MEDIA 94 Conference Report 2. ED-MEDIA 94 Paper Awards 3. ED-MEDIA 95 Call for Papers ED-MEDIA 94 Conference Report ----------------------------- ED-MEDIA--World Conference on Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia is held annually and is one of the best established conferences dedicated to educational uses of computers with emphasis on multimedia. ED-MEDIA 94 was held in Vancouver, Canada, June 25-30 and was attended by over 700 delegates from more than 40 countries. This is a significant increase over the 500 delegates attending the conference in 1993 and attests to the recognition of the conference and its coverage of this increasingly important subject. The conference began with twelve well-attended workshops on topics such as design of courseware, collaborative learning, teaching strategies and ITS, design of visual interfaces, multimedia technologies, multimedia evaluation, practical guidelines for producing videodisks, and others. The main program featured a banquet speaker and six keynote speakers, one from industry and one from academia for each day. Industry was represented by the hypertext visionary Ted Nelson, John Gage--director of the Science Office at SUN Microsystems, and Wayne Grant--the R&D Manager and Senior Scientist from Apple. Academia was represented by Kellogg Booth from the Univ. of British Columbia, Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann from the Univ. of Geneva, Switzerland, Hermann Maurer from the Univ. of Auckland (New Zealand) and Graz (Austria). The banquet speaker was Elliot Soloway from the Univ. of Michigan. In addition, eight invited speakers covered topics including educational multimedia and networking, tutoring systems for industrial training, multimedia and distance education, virtual classrooms and collaborative learning, multimedia authoring tools and interactive learning in computer science, and AI and educational technology. The conference centered around more than 175 papers accepted mainly from the university community, and 90 demonstrations and posters. The presented papers covered areas divided into sessions on AI in education, computer assisted training, country specific developments, computer supported cooperative work, development approaches, distance education, evaluation of multimedia and hypermedia systems, human computer interface, multimedia as a tools to improve classroom teaching, interactive learning environments, multimedia applications, novel applications, approaches, and ideas, pedagogical issues, environments and techniques for teaching programming languages, simulations for learning, and virtual reality. A recurring comment from attendees was the opportunity to obtain information on a wide range of topics at one conference with the central focus of multimedia in education, and the possibility to meet colleagues working in differing but related fields. Six panels were organized on topics including authoring for ITS, electronic games and the learning of mathematics and science, distance learning, internetworking for K-12 education, multimedia publishing, and the use of hypermedia in the teaching and learning of programming. The panelists included researchers from universities, industry, and major publishers. A number of exhibitors presented new hardware and software for education. Several birds-of-a-feather meetings were organized and international networking received the widest attention. Announcements made at the conference included a new refereed quarterly International Journal of Educational Telecommunications published by AACE, and the organization of the new Asia-Pacific Chapter of AACE with its associated International Conference on Computers in Education. On the day following the official closing of the conference, over 60 participants attended tours of seven multimedia labs at local universities and at the Open Learning Agency. The 784 page proceedings of full and short papers, information about panels, demonstrations, and posters is available from AACE. The next ED-MEDIA conference will be held in Graz, Austria, June 18-21, 1995, with a Distance Education strand. ED-MEDIA 96 will be held in Boston, MA, USA. Reported by: Ivan Tomek, Acadia University, Wolfeville, Nova Scotia, Canada ED-MEDIA 94 Best Paper Awards ----------------------------- The ED-MEDIA 94 Program Committee selected and awarded the following five papers for Best Paper Awards. MUSLI: A MUlti-Sensory Language Interface Jennifer Lennon & Hermann Maurer Univ. of Auckland, New Zealand Transfer of a natural language system for problem solving in physics to other domains Graham E. Oberem Univ. of Washington, USA ELM-PE: A knowledge-based programming environment for learning LISP Gerhard Weber & Antje Mollenberg Univ. of Trier, Germany SMALLTALKER: A cognitive apprenticeship multimedia environment for learning Smalltalk programming Yam San Chee National Univ. of Singapore, Singapore It's not how multi the media, it's how the media is used Richard G. Feifer & Laura T. Allender Inst. for the Learning Sciences,USA ED-MEDIA 95 Call for Papers --------------------------- ED-MEDIA 95 will be held June 18-21 in Graz, Austria. See Call for Papers section in main menu of AACE Information Server for details. +------+ | AACE | +------+ .