Invited Lecture at Waseda University   (Draft)

Host: Prof Motoei Azuma

This was my second visit to Waseda University. During my first visit [»] Prof Azuma had asked me whether I would come back and give a lecture to a combined group of his postgraduate and undergraduate students. I offered a selection of topics that I felt they might be interested in, and we agreed that I should talk about website development in the UK and my personal experiences having designed SCISM's WWWsite [»], StaffWeb [restricted access] and StudentWeb [»].

Miscellaneous...

My talk was scheduled to take place within one of the weekly Wednesday afternoon sessions usually devoted to the students' presentations of their research progress, or of published research papers that they had recently "digested". There were about 20 students in attendance, plus Prof Azuma's research associate / PhD student Mokoto Nonaka, and Prof Azuma himself. My talk was scheduled to last 90 minutes, but in the event I talked for over two hours (with a short break in the middle). I wasn't quite sure how many of the students were able to follow what I was saying, but when I asked Prof Azuma about this afterwards he said his impression was that something like a third probably followed completely, another third probably followed partially, and the final third probably understood very little! From the question and answer session it was clear at least that some of the students had certainly been following my talk quite closely.

During my talk I mentioned that I had seen little evidence of intranet information systems within Japanese universities, and I asked whether there was one at Waseda. Mokoto said that there was, and he later showed me what it looked like - although since it was in Japanese I couldn't make much sense of it. He explained that certain pages were restricted to (for example) research associate access, or faculty access. There is a also a unit registration system that allows students to register themselves on certain units. He told me that these facilities were developed centrally at Waseda.

After my presentation there were teas and cakes for all, and many of the students came up to talk to me. I discovered that two of the postgraduate students were from China. When I asked why they had wanted to study at Waseda they said "Waseda University is very famous in China". They both spoke good English, and said that they had come (independently) to Japan to learn the language for one or two years before embarking on their Masters course at Waseda. I was very impressed ... the thought of trying to become fluent in a foreign learning in such a short space of time seems like quite a daunting prospect to me. Two of the final year undergraduate students told me that they were planning to apply very soon for Masters courses in the USA - one to MIT and the other to Georgia (since Waseda and Georgia currently have a student exchange programme). They were rather concerned however that they might have quite a lot of catching up to do given that their undergraduate course (at Waseda) is not entirely focussed on computing.

Outline of my presentation...

Internet penetration in Japan versus the UK...
   » some statistics found on the WWW
   » Tesco is the most successful eGrocer in the world
What we teach our students...
   » Undergraduate Courses
   » A typical unit: "Effective Web Page Design"
Typical 2nd generation websites...
   » SCISM WWWsite
   » SCISM StaffWeb & StudentWeb
Speaking from experience...
   » Personal preferences vary
   » Main issues and challenges
   » Accessibility is important
   » Future development
PHP...
   » Overview
   » Case Study: Online Unit Evaluation Questionnaire
   » Security concerns
Future thoughts...
   » websites are now "business-critical"
   » eLearning platforms