# GCCCE 2011 in Hangzhou


![](http://reganmian.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Screen-shot-2011-06-07-at-6.32.45-PM.png "Screen shot 2011-06-07 at 6.32.45 PM")Last
week, I went to Hangzhou to participate in the Global Chinese Conference
on Computers in Education (GCCCE). Hangzhou is a beautiful city, where I
once spent half a year, and I was looking forward to a chance to go
back. The registration fee for the conference was also quite reasonable,
only \$75 for students, and I wanted a bit of a chance from the village
life. The trip began with waving down a bus going to Xi'an from the side
of the highway that passes by close to the village where I am staying.
Three hours later, I got there, had some noodles (they had hot dry
noodles - which this blog is named after (reganmian), something you
almost never see outside Wuhan!).

Then on to a sleeper train for a 24 hour trip to Hangzhou. They had
trains that only needed 18 hours, but the tickets were sold out (and
soon, they will probably have high-speed trains that make the distance
in much less). It was reasonably uneventful, I read on my Kindle for
most of the distance, until a little child was walking on the platform
during a stop-over, and fell through the gap between the train and the
platform. It was quite dramatic, while the mother was lowered down on
the platform to retrieve him through a service entrance.

I got to Hangzhou, and went to the hotel to register. There I was very
happy to run into [Zhang
Yibing](http://www.linkedin.com/pub/yibing-zhang/21/9b4/844), a
professor at Nanjing University who spent time in Toronto as a visiting
scholar. He invited me along with some colleagues to the famous West
Lake for some green tea, and we had very nice discussions about his work
on adapting [[Knowledge Forum]] to be used in local schools.

Although I have participated in some international conferences in China
before (including OpenCourseWare Consortium 2008 in Dalian), and some
workshops and meetings, I'd never participated in a full-blown
peer-reviewed conference all in Chinese. And this was also a "global"
Chinese conference, which meant that many of the presenters were from
Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and even the US.

Attending any conference is always quite exhausting - a never-ending
parade of 15-minute presentations on new topics, often by people who are
not very good at public speaking, and are eager to get through all the
minute details of their research in the allotted time. Add to that the
fact that it was all in Chinese, often in "interesting" dialects, and
many times with slides in traditional characters, and I was completely
worn out by the end of the two days.

I did [[gccce11:notes|take notes]] on some of the presentations I
attended - some of these are quite minimal, because I sometimes began to
take notes, and then realized that the contents were not very relevant
to my interests, or I was simply too tired to continue.

The quality was quite varying. There were some excellent presentations
on the one hand, and some incredibly simplistic ones (using 15 minutes
to explain how to use basic internet technologies, for example), and
everything in between.

[[gccce11:nancy\_law\_keynote|Nancy Law]] from HKU presented on
sustainable technological innovation, with many examples from Hong Kong
and around the world. A very important point for those of us who wish to
see the good practices and software innovations that come out of our
research be widely implemented in schools and school districts.
[[gccce11:yang\_keynote|Yang Zongkai]] introduced the national education
plan, which I have mentioned here
[before](http://reganmian.net/blog/2010/02/28/key-numbers-from-chinas-2010-2020-education-plan/).
He was one of the people involved in writing it, and in a very good
position to explain it (and the process of writing it). He underlined
the importance of a whole chapter being devoted to educational
technology, however the plan is so detailed, that his speech became a
very high-level fly-over.

[[gccce11:wang\_keynote|Gwo-Jen Hwang]] from National Taiwan University
of Science and Technology had a very engaging and humorous keynote about
the research and experimentation his lab has done around ubiquitous and
mobile learning. Lot's of great examples, highlighted with video clips.
Unfortunately I could not find any of these videos on his website, but
he has a long list of
[publications](http://cctsai.net/gjhwang/publish.htm).

Some of the presentations were highly technical, and did not so much
focus on the pedagogical aspects of how their technical innovations
could be used, for example [[gccce11:cai\_su|Cai Su]]'s 3D environments,
and [[gccce11:sun\_maoyuan|Sun Maoyuan]]'s semantic intelligent question
answering system.

Probably the most interesting presentation was by
[[gccce11:chen\_wenli|Chen Wenli]] from Singapore's National Institute
of Education, who presented on a tool called [[GroupScribbles]], and
what she called "Rapid Knowledge Building". The tool looks really
interesting, and I am planning to read some of the articles about it,
and blog more about it (unfortunately, it only seems to run on Windows,
so I won't be able to easily try it out on my Mac).

I am vegetarian, and although they almost always have food I can eat at
Chinese restaurants, they still think of meat as "higher status", and
sometimes it can be hard to find vegetable dishes at "fancy" occasions,
like weddings or banquets. Imagine my surprise when I asked whether
there would be any vegetarian dishes, and was told that there was a
special table for vegetarians! I ended up having very nice dinners both
days with a group of Taiwanese researchers (not a single mainland person
at the table), many of whom were Buddhist. This only strengthens my wish
to visit Taiwan sometime soon.

All in all, an interesting event, and a great warm-up for [CSCL
2011](http://www.isls.org/cscl2011) in Hong Kong next month.

Stian