As every year, it was again the moment to visit the SIIE 2005 Conference. This is an international conference about Computers and Education which is held yearly alternating locations in Portugal and Spain. This year we all went to Portugal, and the conference was held in the beautiful Leiria.
Just like last year’s edition, the highlights were the friendliness of the organization committee and the domestic (yet exotic) feeling imbued by the fact that half of the presentations are in Portuguese and the other half in Spanish (note for foreigners: Spanish and Portuguese people can understand each other more or less provided we speak slowly).
The contributions had a good overall level (with a low acceptance ratio) and covered a variety of fields. About having fun while learning, there were a few contributions worth mentioning.
Guillermo Jiménez Díaz, Mercedes Gómez Albarrán and some other fellows from my own Complutense University of Madrid presented the paper “Visualización y Role-play en la Enseñanza de la Programación Orientada a Objetos” (Visualization and Role-play for teaching Object Oriented Programming). Role-play is a teaching/design method often used in Object Oriented Programming, where different people play the roles of different objects and simulate the passing of messages and control flow using a ball that is passed from person to person. The paper presented a 3D environment that simulates this activity. There is more information on the project’s website.
Filipa Filipe, Miriam Aguiar and some others presented the paper entitled “e-COPOS: Utilização de um jogo 3D como ferramenta de aprendizagem em e-Learning” (e-COPOS: Use of a 3D game as an e-learning tool). They have developed a beautiful and well-polished game about the relationship between alcohol and driving.
Finally, I wouldn’t want to end this report without commenting the friendliness of the organization committee with a special mention for Isabel Pereira, who acted as our host and struggled to make us happy during our stay in Leiria. Thank you!
This week I have assisted the SPDECE 2005 conference in Barcelona (Spain). The objective of this conference is to drive the evolution of the Learning Object Model in Spain, gathering a number of experts from a variety of fields. Most of the assistants are also part of RED-AOPA, a community of Hispanic researches involved in the domain of Learning Objects.
This contrasts with other conferences that focus mainly in the technological aspects of LOs, and the result is a conference with a unique flavour. If the experience during the SPDECE 2004 conference was interesting, this year has been as exciting and worthwhile.
Some may say that, in spite of the special publication for selected papers, the conference does not have a high-repercussion publication of the proceedings. However, this has a wonderful side-effect. Academics don’t come because it will look great in their CV, but because they are actually interested in the field and in seeing it become a reality. Because of this, most sessions derived in interesting discussions, with the experts in different domains doing their best to explain their points of view in a manner that would be understandable for academics from other fields.
All in all, a wonderful experience and I’m really looking forward to next year’s edition.
After a long exhausting year, the last effort was to assist to a conference… Did I say effort? I would hardly say that visiting one of the most vibrant cities in the far side of the world is really an effort.
I’m talking about the 4th International Conference in Web-based Learning (ICWL) held in Hong Kong, China. After an emotionally challenging year, I decided to turn that trip into a reward, and it has definitely worked. Such a nice experience deserved being told in detail and so I did in this log (only in Spanish, sorry). I did also take a lot of pictures, which can be found in the photo-album.
And the conference? Well, it had a superb organization, better than any conference I have ever attended. These were serious people, with a serious organization and a serious publication for the proceedings (Springer-LNCS). The average level of the publications was nice, and all was happiness and joy. I really recommend this conference.
As for our publication, I can’t post that paper here for copyright reasons, but the abstract can be found here.
