CERI Eye - Seoul Digital Forum

Francesc Pedro reports from the Seoul Digital Forum
Seoul City (Korea), May 28- June 1 2007

The Seoul Digital Forum is a major media event sponsored by the main TV network in Korea, SBS, since 2004 and is intended to provide an opportunity to network in the growing area of digital media business. This year the topic was “Media Big Bang” and included as major speakers the CEO of Google, the editor of the Wired magazine, the president of Associated Press and the president of the Disney Television Channel. The main idea floating during this Forum was the convergence of media, irrespective of origin (newspapers, tv, internet,…) on a multichanneled market.
In this Forum I had the opportunity to present our work on the New Millennium Learners and to participate in an expert panel including Joseph Adler, Co-founder of The MetaMedia Lab at Stanford (US), Maeng, Jung Ju, Mayor, Gangnam District Government (Korea), and Graham Brown-Martin, Founder & Managing Director, Handheld Learning (UK). Our session was attended by some 300 people, mostly Koreans working in media industries.
Joseph Adler, Professor at Stanford University and designer of Magical Theater among other educational software applications, presented a very interesting comparison. On one half side of the screen he showed a film about dinosaurs, with sound and movement, and on the other he presented how the pages of an encyclopedia looked if you were searching information about, again, dinosaurs. His question to the audience was: which one do you think attracts more attention and provokes more excitement for the learner? Easy to answer if you have in mind the stereotype of a new millennium learner… but I wonder whether the right question is which one to chose or how could we have both at the same time: all the information in a single engaging presentation?