Opening Ceremony of the IAALD-AFITA-WCCA Conference in Atsugi, Tokyo.

Today it was the opening day of the World Conference on Agricultural Information and Information Technology, a joint congress of the International Association of Agricultural Information Specialist (IAALD), the Asian Federation for Information Technology in Agriculture (AFITA) and the World Congress of Computers in Agriculture (WCCA). See the conference website.The Conference is taking place at the Atsugi Campus of the Tokyo University, Japan.

The highlights of the opening ceremony have been the welcome address by Peter Ballantyne, the president of IAALD, and the keynote address by Fedro Zazueta (University of Florida).

Peter Ballantyne shortly introduced the conference and posed the following question as the central question to which the conference should answer (the “Atsugi Question”, as he called it): how can we make agricultural information and IT truly accessible?

Fedro Zazueta gave a very interesting talk on technologies for online education, focusing on the challenges both faced and posed by new technologies, in particular a) the acceptance of the new trends (e.g. if given the choice, students will choose to watch lessons on line) on the part of the management and the teaching body and the consideration that “It is often difficult to divest from old paradigms”; b) the fact that better learning and reduced costs only happen if you re-think the process and not if you just add the use of new technologies to a traditional approach; c) the fact that a technology-exposed generation uses information in different. unexpected ways and the (thrilling) possibility that students born with technology might develop differences in the way their brain works.

More on the following sessions in the next posts.