German Award on Distance Training
We're happy to announce that our VSNS BioComputing Course project received a ``Special Prize on Distance
Training'' awarded by the ASK-Akademische Software Kooperation, Karlsruhe,
and donated by the German building & loan association ``Schwäbisch-Hall''.
The competition, called ``Multimedia Transfer '97'', was
conducted during the Learntec '97, a fair on educational technology.
The prize included nice artwork, and a cash reward.
``Multimedia Transfer '97'' aims to get together software developers from academia, and prospective users from industry; it's main emphasis is the development of multimedia software for teaching, and several prizes were given to the best products or prototypes. More than 100 programs were sent in last fall, and the 30 best were presented on the fair.
Our submission aimed at the special prize for the ``Best work in the
area of Distance Training'' donated by ``Schwäbisch-Hall'', which is
one of the biggest German building societies. They have their own
staff development center, which aims to conduct some courses via the
Inter/Intranet in the near future.
Some pictures and the laudatio can be found at http://www.ask.uni-karlsruhe.de/~doc/transfer97/index.html.
Unfortunately, it's all in German; if that's no problem, there's also the
award description (http://www.ask.uni-karlsruhe.de/~doc/transfer97/pt_bck.html), and the
other contest winners (http://www.ask.uni-karlsruhe.de/~doc/transfer97/preistraeger.html).
Here's an __unofficial__ translation of the laudatio by Prof. Adolf Schreiner, Universität Karlsruhe. It's an encouragement for everyone involved in the 1995 and 1996 courses !
The prize donated by the building society ``Schwäbisch-Hall'', for the best work in the area of distance training (10.000 DM), has been awarded to the "program" BioComputing Course. This "program" goes beyond lecture hall and lectern, using the Internet. 30 collaborators contributed teaching material. 71 students and scientists from 14 countries have taken part in the course, [e.g.] from their office. To participate, it suffices to have a PC and a connection to the Internet. The "program" is taught in the framework of the "Virtual School of Natural Sciences". Thus, we can take a look into the virtual university. The "program" uses established technologies, which are inexpensive; special attention should be drawn to the enormous organisational and conceptional work that has been done. The project was supported by the Association for the Promotion of Science and Humanities in Germany (Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft).
We'd like to thank the following people for their help; without their contributions, there would not be a BioComputing Course, and no award !
Our special thanks go to Alexander Sczyrba, who helped with the development of most of the demonstration material. Alex also helped us presenting the course at the Learntec Fair, together with Dieter Lorenz and Gustavo Glusman.
More than 100 more people have made important contributions to the course, beginning with the Hypertext Book Authors, Instructors, Consulting Students, all 1995 and 1996 students, and last not least those who sent support letters, greeting cards, helped demonstrating the BioMOO electronic conferencing system, etc, etc. We've been funded in part by the Association for the Promotion of Science and Humanities in Germany (Stifterverband fuer die Deutsche Wissenschaft, Essen, Germany). The Research Center for Studies in Structure Formation (RCSF), Bielefeld (also known as FSPM - Strukturbildungsprozesse, headed by Andreas Dress), the local Computing Center and the Molecular Biology Computational Resource, Baylor College Of Medicine, provided some crucial facilities.
My [G.F.'s] special thanks go to those who assisted during the course development without looking for benefits, just because they loved the idea, wanted to encourage me, wanted to make my job easier. (I made their life harder at times ;-) Among these are David Steffen, Wolfram Altenhofen, Rebecca Parsons, Peter Serocka, Ed Moriarty, Harald Picard and Chris Schleiermacher.