Overall Goal of the Working Conference

HCI-ET will focus on the synergy between HCI and research in the area of the design of Educational Tools. Thus the goal of the Working Conference is twofold: from one point of view, to bring key insights from HCI research together and to find a framework and style for communication of these insights to the educational- tool design community, and from another, to suggest new perspectives and directions that research into the design of Educational Tools could bring to HCI. Another overarching issue concerns the transformational roles of advanced technologies in teaching and learning.

Two integrated resources (a WWW site and a well-structured book) aimed at disseminating the results of the Working Conference to the broader community will be designed and produced.

Participants will form working teams based on their common interest in a particular topic. These topics (considered in the light of the above mentioned overarching questions) are:

 Learner Modelling
 Collaborative Learning
 Interaction and Feedback
 Methods and Processes for Design
 Implementation Issues and Examples
 Approaches to Evaluation

Authors are invited to submit papers addressing one of the proposed topics and/or overarching questions. Authors intending to contribute should submit an abstract of about 400 - 500 words. The abstracts should be submitted not later than March 15th1997 either with the submission form offered from the WWW site http://www-it.fmi.uni-sofia.bg/ HCIET or by Email. In the latter case the author should save the submission form on her/his local computer, then fill it in and finally send it by Email to HCIET@fmi.uni-sofia.bg .

Authors are encouraged to send with the abstracts the URLs of some representative WWW sites (their own home page, WWW page of a relevant project / organization, etc.).

Authors will be notified of acceptance for presentation at the Conference by March 15th, 1997. After that all abstracts of accepted papers will be made public on the Internet.

The full text of the accepted papers (about 3500 - 4000 words) must be submitted by April 30th, 1997. Two options for papers submission will be provided:

authors provide only papers' URLs, taking all the responsibility for the access and availability of the papers;
authors send full papers to the Local organizing committee (HTML, RTF or Microsoft Word format) and the committee takes the responsibility for the access and availability of the paper.

The conference proceedings will be available online. Authors of accepted papers will be responsible for making available further hard copies of their papers at the conference.

Conference Organization and Structure

A WWW server is established at Sofia to support all main pre-conference activities: invitations, confirmations, submissions, etc.

HCI-ET conference will include brief paper presentations and discussion sessions.

First day

 Opening session: brief presentations and discussion on introductory papers (book chapters);
 Parallel sessions of the topic groups: brief paper presentations and discussion resulting in proposal as to how papers/resources available could fit into a book chapter;

Second day

 Panel discussion(s) elaborating on each topic group’s proposals, identifying the book structure and the procedure how to achieve this structure using the available resources.

After the end of the conference all main results (main points from the discussions, proposals and decisions about the book structure, proposals for further organization of the book preparation, etc.) will be put on the WWW site.