Resources in Context: Proceedings of the AMTEC '82 Conference, Winnipeg, Manitoba, June 6-9

E.R. Campbell was a higher education consultant who lived in Toronto.

This is a report of the proceedings of the 6-9 June 1982 conference of the Association for Media and Technology in Education in Canada. It covers the state of the art in educational media in Canada, including closed-circuit television, satellite television, Telidon, instructional technology, microcomputers, media courses by computer management, how to use film to teach English as a second language, studies on resistance to all of the above changes, and much, much more. There are theoretical inclusions as well as practical ones — e.g., “Computer Managed Instruction Format for an Introductory Media Course,” by James J. LaFollette, and “Resource Centre Booking Systems,” by John Godfreyson are practical ones, while Hanna Moyers’ “An Anatomy of Resistance to Change” and Bill Winn’s “Visual Instructional Strategies” are quite theoretical. The report is composed of papers given, descriptions and abstracts of workshops and seminars held, and a verbatim transcript of the keynote address. The editor is Paul Hurly, Assistant Professor, Continuing Education Division, The University of Manitoba. The volume is well illustrated and adequate bibliographies are appended to many of the papers. As is the custom in Canadian association publishing, papers in both the official languages are included. There is even a course unit on microcomputers, from Queen’s University Educational Media course. The paper on the future role of radio and television instruction includes various graphs and tables and a very adequate bibliography for further study.

The quality of the papers is uneven, ranging from the very elementary to the very theoretical. In addition, some of the papers are represented in publication solely by abstracts, some by abstracts and the complete text, and some by the complete text of the paper only. These “proceedings” would have been much more beneficial to the reader had they been true proceedings — a verbatim text of the conference including the workshop discussions. A third session by R. J. Schmidt etal. entitled “Damn the Reactionaries, Pass the Ammunition” on assisting media consultants in selling the new technology to “traditional” educators is also represented by an abstract. This abstract is also the conference programme descriptive narrative of the session. But in this case it is not even clear in publication as to what actually happened here. Was it a paper, a workshop, a seminar, a panel, or what? It fails to state. Finally, where does one write to obtain the complete texts of the papers for the above sessions — to the session speaker, or to the “additional copies” address? It does not state. This information would have made the volume much more helpful.