I feel very privileged to have had the opportunity to live with my family in Japan for nearly six months, and to visit so many Japanese universities and speak with so many eminent Japanese professors during that time.
The invitation from Celoxica to join their university tour was extremely fortuitous, although since fact-finding was only a secondary aim of the tour I didn't have the opportunity to find out nearly as much during (most of) those visits as I did when I visited institutions independently. On the other hand I learned a lot - mainly from Colin and Chris - about reconfigurable computing, and I feel certain that this will become an important mainstream technology in the very near future.
I also very much enjoyed attending the NIME International Symposium and I feel I picked up a lot of insights there into the current state of eLearning, not only in Japan but worldwide.
Counting the visit I made several years ago to see Prof Takashi Nanya at the Tokyo Institute of Technology (I also gave an invited talk to his students at that time), I have now visited a total of 14 distinct universities, assuming the Institute of Space and Astonautical Research counts as a university. In several cases I visited twice, to meet with different professors. Of the top ten universities identified by Notkin & Schlichting (1993), I have now visited seven. However, all my visits were brief and my impressions are inevitably sketchy ... and I am well aware that they may not be entirely accurate.
In the month that remains of my sabbatical I intend to finalise this web diary (i.e. tie up loose ends and download from local hard disk to SBU web server), and to produce these four SBU Technical Reports...
1. "Sabbatical in Japan: Collected Visit Reports"
- to exclude Celoxica tour visits
(Ref: SBU-CISM-02-01)
2. "Celoxica Tour of Japanese Universities 2001: Collected Visit Reports"
(Ref: SBU-CISM-02-02)
3. "Computer Science Education in Japan"
(Ref: SBU-CISM-02-03)
4. "Slow take-up of eLearning in Japan"
(Ref: SBU-CISM-02-04)
...the latter two of which I will subsequently submit for journal publication.