From the 2nd millennium B.C. to the year 2080

I have just arrived from a really long, long trip through time: from the 2nd millennium B.C. to the year 2080. Before attending the EC-TEL 2007 conference in Crete I spent a weekend in Athens. There is no doubt that anything is a good excuse to experience The Acropolis. Though crowded of tourist and scaffolds, the shapes, the colors and even the smell of such outstanding ancient constructions enable imagining in situ the evolution, life and destruction which dominated the pre-eminent monument. This time I also manage to visit the Museum of Cycladic Art. Its exhibition includes Greek artifacts from the Bronze Age (2nd millennium BC) through to the Late Roman period (4th century AD). However, the museum is well-known because of the archaeological remains of the Cycladic culture, active on the Cyclades, a cluster of islands in central Aegean, between 3200 and 2000 B.C. The collection contains 350 objects representative of every phase or type of artifact those islanders have left us, be that marble sculpture, pottery, or metal ware. Among the exhibits, the marble figurines, mostly female, claim prime position (see the temporally-available picture in the header). It was simply fantastic to observe the figurines of the 3rd millennium B.C!

After the weekend in Athens I move to Crete to work (arggg, yes! I need to have a less responsible personality in order to fully enjoy the vacation-like locations of some conferences :S). So it is, I attended the whole conference. I would say that the quality of the conference was good in general with papers dealing mainly with social software, metadata and adaptation (among others, of course). You might want to have a look to its related wiki and blog, which I find very useful. However, I am no so content with the organization. I am sure that they have worked a lot and everything run well during the conference. But as far as the management of papers are concerned I am quite disappointed. The fact is that in the CFP states that “Proceedings will be published in Springer LNCS… The page limit is 15 pages for full papers, 6 pages for posters” and that in the e-mail notifying the acceptance of my contribution they said that “it has been accepted for poster presentation at EC-TEL’07, and for publication as short paper (6 pages) in the conference proceedings”. To my surprise, my paper and the rest of papers being presented as posters have not been included in Springer LNCS but on CEUR-WS.org, which is not obviously the same!

Anyway I appreciate the efforts that manage to make the poster session proceedings available, and this is our contribution:

Hernández-Leo D., Burgos, D., Tattersall, C., Koper, R., Representing Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning macro-scripts using IMS Learning Design, Second European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, ISSN 1613-0073, online CEUR-WS.org/Vol-280
The poster is also available here and this is an extended report of the research, which I completed in a research stay at the Open University of the Netherlands last year.

One of the original aspects of the conference was the two keynote speakers, Bruce Sterling and Hermann Maurer, both are science fiction writers! We got two books of H. Maurer at the conference. One of them is “The Paranet”. This book makes us think over what would happen if the ‘Net’, the universal computer network of the year 2080, collapses unexpectedly and completely. I am currently reading the book and how the chaos starts to reign all over the world. More about this book would be probably the topic of a future post.