reflections on Teleteaching 98

Teleteaching ´98 was the fifth in a series of conferences organised by TC3 and Working Group 3.6 Distance Learning.

The previous four were:

  1. Teleteaching ´86 in Budapest, Hungary, October ´86
  2. Teleteaching ´90 in Sydney, Australia, July ´90
  3. Teleteaching ´93 in Trondheim, Norway, Aug. ´93
  4. Teleteaching ´96 in Canberra, Australia, Sept. ´96
These conferences have been an excellent opportunity to watch the development of the educational use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in education.

WG 3.6 was the idea of a Hungarian, Gyozo Kovacs, who organised a conference in Budapest, Hungary, in October, 1986. This was the first Teleteaching conference and possibly the first use of the word teleteaching, a word which still arouses mixed feelings. The proceedings of that conference were published by Elsevier North-Holland and are an interesting reflection on work at that time. A notable absence is any reference to the use of conferencing systems, something which we now see as an important way of supporting teaching at a distance.

In 1988 at the European Conference on Computers in Education held in Lausanne, Switzerland, the Working Group held a panel session on distance learning. The Working Group was still mainly concerned with the use of distance learning in higher education, but at the next major event, the IFIP World Conference on Computers in Education which took place in Sydney, Australia, in 1990, the Working Group broadened its interests to encompass distance learning at other educational levels. The Working Group organised a mini-conference in Sydney as part of the World Conference and called it Teleteaching ‘90. This mini-conference was a joint conference with Working Group 3.1 and the association with that group flourished sufficiently for the major IFIP TC 3 conference of 1993 to be organised again jointly. Teleteaching ‘93 was held in Trondheim, Norway.

Teleteaching 96 was part of IFIP’s 14th World Computer Congress, Canberra, Australia, September 1996.
It was a Virtual Conference in conjunction with an on-site conference. Hundreds of interested colleagues from around the world, including students, interacted with the on-site delegates from their desktop or local access points internationally. Instead of traditional paper presentations and keynotes, there were seven half day interactive events, even a virtual social event and a virtual exhibition.

Teleteaching ´98:
The goal of Teleteaching ´98 was to demonstrate the use of ICT in education in a broad sense. The conference covered education at all levels from primary school to universities. A special focus was on Distance Education and Teleworking.

We received 173 papers from 44 countries around the world. That is a record for IFIP Teleteaching conferences. Based upon these papers and other contributions, we set up a diversified programme with up to 6 parallell sessions in the following areas:

Generally speaking, I will say that TT98 was a success. This is based upon talks with participants, session chairs etc.

I have already received questions about when and where the next teleteaching conference will take place. The best answer I can give is to give a list of upcoming WG3.6 conferences in 1999:

Communications and Networking in Education:
Learning in a Networked Society (ComNEd'99)
Dates : 13-18 June 1999
Venue : Finland, Aulanko (100 km north of Helsinki).
Joint conference with WG3.1 and WG3.5

Building University Electronic Educational Environments
Dates : 2 - 6 August 1999
Venue : Irvine, California
Joint conference with WG3.2

 

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