Dear
Everybody
Perhaps
not all of you are aware, but IAPR is not only an affiliate organization of
independent national societies, but is itself an affiliate member of a larger
organization called the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP).
As the newsletter editor, I regularly receive the newsletter of IFIP which I
scan for items which might interest the readers of this newsletter. I read with
interest in the latest issue of the IFIP newsletter a news item which I found
perhaps a little disturbing: the world's first paper-less conference was held
last year in Australia. Extracts are re-produced on page 8. Panic! Is that the
end of conferencing? Shall we all start sending our presentations to a mailing
list of interested people in a multimedia CD-ROM, who will browse through them
at their pace, come back through the Internet for comments and thus advance the
frontier of Science without the extra expense of banquets, airfares, etc? Will
our sponsors catch up on the idea and stop approving money for travelling?
Panic! Panic! Shall we start having teleconferences without ever leaving the
four walls of our offices and our computer screens? More panic! More panic!
Perhaps,
that is the shape of things to come. At the moment, however, if you read the
article more carefully, you will see that there was actually a meeting where
people held discussions on short talks they gave and the multimedia
presentations they had prepared. Nevertheless, it will not surprise me in the
least if the bleak picture I painted above will come sooner or later as the
issue of money comes in. Part of the article, which I did not reproduce here,
contained the interesting item of information that it has been calculated that
it costs less to educate a student using multimedia technology than
conventional methods. When such ideas catch up, according to my opinion, will
be the beginning of the human race losing a major means of communication: the
body language. It is believed that 60% of human communication is not verbal.
True, this 60% includes pictures which a computer can reproduce, but it mainly
includes the body language which no computer can reproduce. It includes the eye
contact and the gestures of the teacher/lecturer which no multimedia course
will use. The skill of conveying intricate information by these means will
gradually diminish as it will not be passed from teacher to pupil and on. But
money rules the world! Alarmist? Perhaps!
At
the moment, however, things proposed in our immediate concern are much more
mild in nature: there have been some voices in IAPR who would like this
newsletter to go fully electronic. "It is too expensive!" "We
chop trees down!" What do you think? Please drop me a line if you have
views on the matter either way. Shall we become another Vision-list or
pixel-volume or perhaps just the IAPR listo-volume?
Maria
Petrou