Prof Yonezawa is one of 14 professors and associate professors belonging to the Department of Informatics, which is part of the Graduate School at Kogakuin. He is one of five based at Hachioji campus; the other nine are based at Shinjuku campus. He told me that he travels in to Shinjuku twice a week, presumably to give lectures.
In Prof Yonezawa's lab there are currently seven final year undergraduate students and three Masters students. When I arrived several of them were present. It seemed to me that there was a very congenial atmosphere, and that students in labs such as Prof Yonezawa's must have a much more intimate relationship with their "sensei" (Japanese for "teacher") than would be normal in a British or American university.
Since I had come specifically to discuss eLearning, I did not ask the usual questions about courses, syllabi etc. Instead, Prof Yonezawa had prepared demonstrations for me of two systems he and his students have recently developed.
The first system Prof Yonezawa showed me was an image viewer that allows the user to select objects within the image and explore the associated information (object attributes). The viewer supports functions such as highlighting and zooming in on individual objects, and the text associated with an object can be spoken using speech synthesis. URLs can also be incorporated as attributes so that, if appropriate, a browser can be invoked and the user taken to a web page containing further information.
The system supports the notion of hierarchical "concepts". If my understanding was correct, a concept provides information about a group of related objects and/or other concepts. A concept can also have attributes. For example, in an image of a PC motherboard the individual memory chips could be defined as individual objects, and there could be a "main memory" concept that in some sense binds these objects together.
In the demonstration he showed me, the image was a map of a small Japanese island close to Okinawa. Objects included things like beaches, roads and settlements. The user could interrogate each object, or do things like select a rectangular area and then search for any occurrence of a keyword within that area. Prof Yonezawa demonstrated this by selecting a rectangular region of the map and then searching for the keyword "nature" - this resulted in two objects being selected, which presumably were nature reserves or something similar. He also demonstrated the editor, which allows an author to define new objects (i.e. clickable areas of the image) and create/edit the attributes associated with each object.
Prof Yonezawa told me that this work is sponsored by METI - the Japanese Dept. of Economy, Trade & Industry [»]. He gave me a copy of a paper describing it that was published in the June 2001 issue of the Transactions of the (Japanese) Institute of Electronics, Information & Communication Engineers [»]. The paper has eight co-authors, each with a different affiliation, although Prof Yonezawa's name is listed first. So this work seems to be the result of collaborative effort, although I believe that Prof Yonezawa and his students have written at least part (if not all) of the software themselves.
The second system Prof Yonezawa (together with one of his students) showed me was a computer-assisted language learning prototype, for teaching both English and sign language. This was in the form of an interactive role-playing game, in which the user is supposedly in America conversing with an American lady whose name is Sylvia. The idea is that the user is faced with three questions, and there is a video-taped response from Sylvia to each question. I didn't fully understand how the user is supposed to interact with the system, but I think the idea was that the user must ask the right sequence of questions - based on previous answers - in order to solve the overall puzzle.
The system uses client-server technology so that many students can engage in the activity at once, each at their own pace. There was an interactive chat area on the screen to enable students to ask for and receive help from each other about how to solve the puzzle.
I asked Prof Yonezawa about his future plans for these two systems, but he said there was no intention to develop them into commercial products. He is happy to make them available for free if anyone wants to use them, but in order to make use of the software a Japanese version of Windows is required. It seems that each year Prof Yonezawa gets his project students to develop or enhance a piece of one of these or some other prototype - so the students are getting valuable hands-on experience of developing a real, non-trivial system. Prof Yonezawa said that one idea he has for future development of the first system is to modify it so that it uses vector graphics rather than raster graphics.
I asked Professor Yonezawa about his opinion of eLearning in Japan generally, and I mentioned what Dr Yamamoto from Keio University had told me about the Ministry of Education's rules about face-to-face teaching. Professor Yonezawa didn't seem sure what rules I was talking about, although he said that he doesn't much like the Ministry of Education's policies!
He suggested that eLearning is nothing new. For example, although he has no intention to develop the two systems he showed me into commercial products, he told me that some years ago he developed a DOS-based system for teaching students assembly language programming that was taken up by others and used widely within Japanese universities (?). He earned a substantial amount of extra income as a result of it. He also told me that in his early teaching years he used to teach Fortran and COBOL on a time-shared central computer, and he constructed a self-teaching package for that too.
It occurred to me afterwards that while eLearning (or "Computer-Aided Learning", "Computer-Assisted Learning", "Computer-Aided Instruction" or whatever) is certainly nothing new, I guess the current surge of interest - that I've noticed, anyway - is due directly to the emergence of the WWW. During our discussion I did ask whether Professor Yonezawa had heard of WebCT [»], but it appeared he hadn't.
As Prof Yonezawa drove me in from the station we passed Kogakuin high school. He told me that roughly 40% of the students from the high school progress to Kogakuin University.
Prof Yonezawa told me that he himself was a student at Kogakuin University - eventually gaining a PhD - and that he has now worked there for 30 years.
In our preliminary email correspondence, Prof Yonezawa said he agreed with my assertion that eLearning is currently under-utilised in Japan.
Prof Yonezawa showed me a recent letter from the publisher John Wiley stating that one of his papers has been accepted for publication in Systems & Computers in Japan - an international journal that publishes English translations of selected Japanese articles [»].