Hi,

Just to let you know that Dr Raab (previously Disney Engineering) will give
a talk in the context of the University of Berne Kolloquium
the 16th of April 2002 at 17h15 at the IAM room 002
http://www.iam.unibe.ch/


Title: Squeak - Combining Media and Technology in Education

Dr. Raab: 
    www.impara.de
    Andreas.Raab at gmx.de

Summary: 

Squeak www.squeak.org is a multi-media authoring system for "children of all
ages". Aimed at designing media-spaces in an educational context, Squeak
provides a rich learning experience reaching from fourth-graders up to
professional software engineers.

The talk will consist of two parts. In the first part, a demonstration
of the capabilities of Squeak, its use for designing media-rich
environments and its use "in the classroom" is given. No specific CS
knowledge is required in order to understand the presentation.

In the second part, architectural implications of media-rich software
environments are discussed, including aspects of object-oriented design,
shared collaborative spaces, and support of widely varying hardware
architectures. Participants should have working knowledge of
component-architectures, object-oriented languages and their applications.


Bio: 

Dr. Raab enjoys combining technology, media, and education in order to
support live-long learning for children and adults, groups and
organisations. He is a specialist in computer graphics, software
architecture and their application to media-rich environments.

In 1998, Dr. Raab received a PhD in Computer Science from the University
of Magdeburg, Germany, where his research was focused on novel
interaction and visualisation techniques for virtual environments. He
also received a diploma (Msc) from the Univ. of Magdeburg in 1994.

Dr. Raab joined Disney in 1998 where he worked with computer visionary
Alan Kay building "Squeak", a media authoring environment for children of
all ages. Working with an inspired group of collegues (including Dan
Ingalls and Ted Kaehler, two of the original inventors of the Smalltalk
programming language) he made major contributions in the areas of media
integration, system architecture and interaction techniques.
 After leaving Disney, Dr. Raab returned to Europe and founded Impara, a
company devoted to bringing educational technology to children in
Europe. His current work is focused on making creative media
environments available in schools and exploring the possibilities of
shared virtual environments for education.