Monday, September 22, 2008

International Conference on IT Innovation Shows Lack of Innovation

I was asked to review a paper for the 14th ACM-SIGCSE Annual Conference on
Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education
(ITiCSE 2009, Paris, July 3-8, 2009). For a paper about international innovation it was surprising to find that there were two versions of the call for papers provided: one for US Letter paper and one for international A4 paper. A few moments thought would have lead the conference organisers to conclude that if they formatted the document correctly it would print on either size page and only one document would be needed.

This may seem a trival point, but the conference deals with the use of technology in supporting computer science teaching and learning, the practice of teaching computer science and computer science education research. ICT is an international discipline and we need international standards in areas such as computer science edcuation. We can't waste time and resources on trivia such as producing versions for slightly different print paper sizes.

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