ACM MM95 Panel: Curriculum, Education and Training about Multimedia

See http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~fox/MM95pan/

Panelists and their Home Pages

• Edward A. Fox, fox@vt.edu, http://fox.cs.vt.edu/ - Panel Moderator
• Florian Brody, browdy@newmedia.co.at
• John Buford, buford@cs.uml.edu
• Joseph Konstan, konstan@cs.umn.edu
• P. Venkat Rangan, venkat@cs.ucsd.edu
• Brian Smith, bsmith@cs.cornell.edu

Issues in Proceedings

1. Level of courses:
   • 1st yr ugrad
   • last yr ugrad
   • grad
2. Department teaching:
   • CS
   • Arts
   • Communications
   • interdisciplinary teams
   • other
3. Needs of industry:
   • research
   • development
   • other
4. Resources for education:
   • case studies
   • courseware (e.g., Virginia Tech EI Project)
   • demonstrations
   • online resources
   • textbooks
   • toolkits
   • other
5. Clearinghouse:
   • value?
   • organization?
   • support?

Topics to Debate

1. SIGMM should ignore education; the field is too young
   VS. SIGMM should form an education committee that should identify knowledge modules, define a core for several types of courses, and outline how this fits into various curriculum
2. SIGMM should target separate undergraduate and graduate courses
   VS. SIGMM should be happy with one graduate level course
   VS. SIGMM should be happy with adding in modules to existing courses on graphics, database systems, operating systems, networking
3. Computer Science needs to claim MM and guard it from other departments
   VS. Interdisciplinary groups must work to define curriculum for various departments
4. Textbooks are needed for each course and we are hampered till we have more
   VS. textbooks are a waste; we should use electronic materials only
5. It is too much work to have a MM courseware clearinghouse and there is little reward
   VS. here in this room we have a volunteer who will do it, as well as people who will contribute (give descriptions and pointers and support things at their site)
6. We need heavy involvement of industry and other employers to define curriculum
   VS. educators have and should and will develop curriculum on their own
7. Education about MM should lead the way in applying technology, involving artists (e.g., like keynote this morning)
   VS. traditional education and training methods are more serious and effective
8. SIGMM should approach NSF and other nations' agencies and vendors to help build infrastructure at many universities for MM education
   VS. there should be a few centers on the Internet that can be widely shared as well as smaller local laboratories and related facilities
   VS. future computers will be sufficiently MM-capable so that no special laboratories or facilities are needed
9. The WWW and its extensions are a good mechanism for sharing MM courseware
   VS. digital libraries, such as those being worked on at Berkeley, CMU, UC Santa Barbara, should be relied upon to provide content and software that would be more valuable and functional than the WWW and its store-and-forwad delivery of low quality content