Information and Communication Technology in Education: Its Status in the Asia-Pacific Region

Citation

Kinshuk, D. (2002), "Information and Communication Technology in Education: Its Status in the Asia-Pacific Region", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 19 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2002.23919cac.004

Information and Communication Technology in Education: Its Status in the Asia-Pacific Region

Kinshuk

The International Conference on Computers in Education (ICCE 2001) provided exposure to the research and development of educational technology in the Asia-Pacific region. About 400 academics and researchers gathered during 12-15 November 2001 at Seoul, Korea to attend this exciting event. The ICCE 2001 was organised by the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE-APC).

The Conference was divided into several types of presentations: keynote and invited speeches, tutorials and workshops, parallel presentation sessions, and posters. On a lighter side, Korean night and side tours were also quite an attraction of the Conference.

Although the issues discussed in the conference ranged from e-learning to adaptive systems, and from traditional intelligent tutoring systems to state-of-the-art multimedia-based approaches, the Internet-based learning and networked environments were the major focus of a large number of presentations.

Keeping with the major focus, Unna Huh of Korea in the first keynote speech talked about e-learning and how it supports the future vision of education. She mentioned that current educational processes are very limited and that e-learning approaches are the way to go. It was interesting to hear such visionary talk from someone who is a member of the National Assembly of Korea.

Another highlight of the Conference was the keynote speech from Ulrich Hoppe of Germany, who talked about collaborative learning in intelligent distributed environments. He mentioned that there are two distinct groups of academics, one focusing on communication facilities for information exchange in virtual learning environments, and the other focusing on the rich dialogue between the learner and the computer. He then described an interesting project that combines these two approaches and provides unified media and representation formats without interfering with the pedagogical aspects and teaching-learning settings.

Six tutorials and workshops were held on the first day of the Conference. The topics varied but they provided in-depth analysis of where the state-of-the-art is in the area of computers in education. For example, Woochun Jun of Korea presented an extensive study on the application of constructivism to Web-based education. Woochun mentioned that various characteristics of constructivism that can be easily applied to Web-based education include learner construction of meaning, social interaction to help students learn, and student problem solving in a "real world" context. Other tutorials and workshops included presentations from Kinshuk on adaptive educational environments for cognitive skills acquisition, and Alfred Bork on an innovative tutorial-based learning approach.

The parallel presentations in the Conference were divided under several themes, but the majority of them reflected today's changing environment from face-to-face to Internet-based education and, more precisely, virtual collaboration. It was evident that the Web is not the only medium that is being researched for educational systems. Various mobile devices have started to appear in the research projects. For example, Jun Jo of Australia presented research work on e-learning with wireless technology and personal digital assistants. Chris Houser of Japan discussed the study of vocabulary using mobile phone e-mail.

Under Web-based systems, it was interesting to hear papers that also discussed hardware manipulation. For example, K.W.E. Cheng of China presented a Web-based virtual power electronics laboratory that can be manipulated by students over the Internet. Hiroshi Suda of Japan described work on camera control and image processing technique for the remote classroom.

Collaboration issues were discussed by many presenters. Stephen C.F. Chan of Hong Kong discussed Web-based management of group projects, and Innwoo Park of Thailand described an international co-operative activity through youth Internet volunteering.

Several papers were also concerned with the attitude of the students in Internet-based learning. Fu-Yun Yu of Taiwan compared student preferences and satisfaction towards network and face-to-face computerized competitive learning environments. Choi Imin discussed the effects on study achievement influenced by way of feedback according to the meta cognition level of the Web.

Agent technology was again the focus of several presentations. For example, Zhang Xiaozhen and Li Jun of China presented their work on an ITS adaptive model of review based on agent technique. Zhang Xiaozhen also discussed an interactive distance learning model based on mobile agents. Sun-Ju Park and Ju-Yeon Ko discussed mobile agent based teaching-learning systems.

In summary, the ICCE 2001 Conference provided a venue for presentation of current research in educational technology. It became very clear that computer-based learning has now moved significantly from those page turners, static courseware, and individual CD-ROM-based products to Internet-based collaborative learning environments, and has also started penetrating into the mobile world. The next ICCE Conference will be organised in Auckland, New Zealand, and it would not be too far-fetched to hope that we shall see a lot of research directly related to the ever-increasing just-in-time and learning-on-demand situations, with more and more research on alternative media of communication.

Dr Kinshuk (kinshuk@massey.ac.nz ) is an Associate Professor at Massey University, New Zealand.