Looking to the future of ODL back in 1992

Sue Waters recently added a news item on Edublogs concerning the embedding of all types of documents in blog posts. This prompted me to experiment with it, and led to this post, the insertion of an old conference paper I found in my cluttered and dusty study.

Back in 1992 I was working at Hong Kong Polytechnic in the Education Technology Unit (yes, without the ‘al’ added to ‘Education’!). It was the year of the 16th world conference of the International Council for Open and Distance Education (ICDE), and as it was going to be in the region (Thailand) I was determined to attend.

Chris and I in 2005 in his boat on the way from Bristol to Bath

Chris and I in 2005 in his narrowboat on the way from Bristol to Bath

To maximise my chances of obtaining funding, I worked hard to contribute as much as possible: a paper, organising a debate and volunteering as a member of the evaluation committee. For the paper, I collaborated with my good friend from the Computing Studies Department, Chris Walsh, to submit something we thought would excite the conference participants: examining the potential of a new and emerging technology (ISDN) for open and distance learning.

So here it is, embedded below: ‘CIT for IT in DE: Computerised Integrated Telephony for and its Potential for Intelligent Tutoring in Distance Education’. It’s not world shattering, I’ll admit, but I nevertheless think we did a good job in anticipating what might lie ahead, especially as the World Wide Web was yet to burst onto the scene.

Note: you’ll see form the paper that by the time of the conference, I’d moved to Deakin University. Somehow, miraculously, I was able to get to the conference.

[embeddoc url=”https://opob.edublogs.org/files/2015/08/1992-CIT-for-DE-1emwla4.pdf” viewer=”google”]

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