Trip Report, Hope Greenberg to:

North American Web Developers Conference (NAWEB 96)
October 4 to 8, 1996, Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada

At that address you will find information about the conference, including the full proceedings. This year there were 2 pre-conference workshops (JavaScript programming taught by Weichang Du and Pedagogical Issues in Developing Web-Based Courseware taught by Allan Ellis) and 22 presenters as well as special presentations by:
Kurt Schmucker from Apple's Advanced Research Group--more on that later!
Jim Miller from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C--you know, at MIT where Tim Berners-Lee works now!)

After the opening addresses from the deputy minister of the province, the vice pres. of the university, a city councilman, and sundry others (at UNB they get everybody involved) there were the NAWEB awards. These awards for "best pages" were nominated by the members of the list and voted on by the attendees.

Highlight: well they were all good story tellers but my fav moment was the exchanging of the flags. Co-chair Allan Ellis, from Australia, has chaired the AUSWeb conference for the last two years. He has also just snagged the 1998 6th International WWW Conference (Wes and I went to the 2nd in Chicago in '94) and will be doing AUSWeb 97.

The regular sessions began on Monday and the full papers are available online. The papers ranged from courses that are web-enhanced to full-blown distance ed courses delivered totally by web. K-12, higher ed and even business training groups were represented, from high tech to low tech.

Highlights: Kurt Schmucker from Apple ARG labs and his demo of Cocoa. Billed as a "problem-solving and non-verbal programming tool," Cocoa will be known to kids as that great program that let's you make games for the web. Cocoa lets you create worlds, solve problems, create simulations and generally learn programming skills without having to learn syntax, or even, without using any words at all. It's aimed at 8-14 year olds but its use, I predict, will be much broader than that. It will be out by the end of the year and available from an Apple web site that is as yet undisclosed (but if you go to cocoa.apple.com you'll see that there is indeed a server by that name, just not populated yet!).

The other intersting day was the JavaScript programming session. It was a half day workshop so we didn't get into great detail but the introduction (which I will post, pending an OK from the instructor) was a good look at the differences between CGI, JAVA programming, and JavaScript. Also, he gave us 40 scripts to take home so we were happy.

Some conclusions: quite a few organizations have jumped into class support or class delivery over the web. As is to be expected, in many cases this has had little effect on what constitutes a course, what is our conception of the university, and what an instructors role is. But as people develop these courses some are beginning to realise several things:

• that the university is not the sole deliverer of education. There is competition from other education providers, or, as Ben Watson from Scholars Com, a Microsoft Online Training Institute provider pointed out: "Why should someone be locked into a specific time two or three times a week, traveling to a specific site, when what they want to learn can be gotten via the web at their own convenience, especially if they have to pay exhorbitant amounts for credits they don't need or want." What would ever happen if employers started looking for specific training or knowledge and not that general badge of intellectual fitness, the BA/BS?

• that a quick perusal of courses offered via the web already shows much overlap. So if you have a choice of taking Classics 101 from Podunk U or from Harvard, which do you think you would choose? This opens up a host of questions about what a university is, why people attend a particular university, how will universities compete in the electronic world in addition to the physical world, etc. etc.

• that letting the students design the course (find the good links, build the pages, etc. in the web environment) engages them more than does rolling out a polished and complete web course for them to simply absorb.

Trip Report: N.A. Web conference, 10/4-8,1996. Hope.Greenberg@uvm.edu, Computing and Information Technology, University of Vermont, 10 Oct 1996.