The 2009 TELDAP International Conference in conjunction with GRL 2020 and MCN Taiwan Meeting will be held at Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan from 23 to 27 February 2009. The joint event is organized by the International Collaboration Division of the Taiwan e-Learning and Digital Archives Program (TELDAP).

DATE: 2008 December 20 - December 22 (Saturday - Monday)

VENUE: Phuket Island, Thailand

WEBSITE: http://www.iccee.org

CONTACTS: International Association of Computer Science and Information Technology, Singapore, iccee2008@gmail.com, +65-6563-7288

DATE: 2009 January 22 (Thursday)

VENUE: Hotel Taj Lands End, Bandra, Mumbai

ORGANIZATIONAL SUPPORT: Employer's Federation of India

WEBSITE: http://www.e-learn.co.in

CONTACTS: Oliver Dickson, SP Media Pvt. Ltd.

In recent years, spatial integration methods, including geographical information systems, spatial analysis and spatial simulation have been the focus of attention of humanities and social science scholars, especially in the field of applied social sciences (including public policy and planning) using spatial integration methods is the hot topic in many academic conferences and research plans. The methods that are very popular in natural sciences and engineering technology have gradually made an appearance in international humanities and social science research circles and play an important role in subject interconnection.

TELDAP has developed a “Adaptive Mobile talking book.” A cell phone can be used to connect to the system using existing network technology, allowing the user to receive live news, weather information for the location the user is in and listen to music. The system will also record and analyze what is listened to and provide personalized programs. Wu Hsu-Chih, researcher at ITRI’s Advanced Technology Center, said that this product has improved Text-to-Speech (TTS), making the mechanical sound more like that of a real person and, moreover, it can also be used to make and broadcast programs automatically; for example, before playing a song, it will automatically search song related information and edit it into a song guide, creating a complete program.

For more details please visit:

http://www.uonline.nccu.edu.tw/content_text.asp?ano=2941

The Union Catalog of Digital Archives, the Asia’s largest Chinese cultural material bank can be searched in the Learning Object Repository in Taiwan（http://www.lort.org.tw）. The objective of linking the two is to integrate Taiwan’s cultural material and teaching material resources, so that more users can search easily with what they want.

For Mainlanders, ocean might be the great wall standing on the horizon. But for the people who lived on the island, the ocean is much more the road than the barrier between land and land. In Shih San Hang Site, archaeologists have discovered many items which were overseas and came from a foreign country, such as Chinese coins, camel bronze plague, glass bangles, agate beads came from India and so on.

In August, 2008 US news website Courant featured a report titled “Video Games Learning Tools?” (Note 1) that pointed out that some researchers have found that student learning effectiveness can be improved by using games and one research project found that surgeons who played surgery games saw an improvement in their surgical skills. Another report was made by Reuters Tokyo on June 27^th (note 2). A teacher at Tokyo’s Joshi Gakuen high school, Motoko Okubo, used NDSL English learning software and textbooks to teach students phonetics and listening comprehension. These two examples show that game learning is effective and countries around the world students are now learning by playing games.

The winning theses in the 2^nd Digital Art Criticism Awards were announced on November 8 in Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art. The winners attended and presented their criticisms, which were judged by judges Jun-Jieh Wang and Chieh-Hsiang Wu etc, and the director of Taipei City Government’s Cultural Affairs Bureau presented the awards and took part in the judging of the criticisms, bringing this year’s Taipei Digital Art Festival to an end on a high note.