New Media Studio

The NMC Horizon Project from the New Media Consortium is a long-term investigation launched in 2002 that identifies and\ndescribes emerging technologies likely to have a large impact over the coming five years in education around the globe. The NMC\nHorizon Report Europe: 2014 Schools Edition, the first of its kind for Europe, examines six key trends, six significant challenges and\nsix important developments in educational technology that are very likely to impact educational change processes in European\nschools over the next five years (2014-2018). The topics within each section were carefully selected by the Horizon Project Europe\nExpert Panel, a body of 53 experts in European education, technology, and other fields. They come from 22 European countries,\nas well as international organisations and European networks. Throughout the report, references and links are made to more than\n150 European publications (reports, articles, policy documents, blog posts etc.), projects (both EU-funded and national initiatives)\nand various policy initiatives from all over Europe. The Creative Classrooms multidimensional framework, developed by European\nCommission’s JRC-IPTS on behalf of DG EAC, was used for analysing the trends, challenges and technologies impacting European\nschools over the next five years. The analysis reveals that a systemic approach is needed for integrating new technologies in\nEuropean schools and impacting educational change over the next five years.

Today, the debate between online services and installable applications is often characterized as an either-or, winner-take-all situation. In the earth sciences, how-ever, due to data handing and visualization needs, a combination of online, service-oriented architecture (SOA) tools and custom installable applications holds the most promise if these data resources are to be used by a greater and more diverse user population. The Data Information and Application Layer (DIAL) technology demonstrates the value of custom application authoring for earth data access and visualization. The relative merits of online tools and custom applications are discussed as well as their complementary uses by various user populations.

In the metropolitan areas of Japan, a critical issue is the improvement of train transportation service including alleviating congestion and reduction of commuting time for traveling to work or school. Therefore, we have developed a train transportation simulation system as a simple means of quantitatively evaluating plans for improving various train transportation services. In addition, since evaluation of congestion is also required in this simulation, we conducted a questionnaire survey regarding congestion. This paper gives an overview of the simulation system we developed, and the results we obtained regarding analysis and modeling of congestion.