%0 Conference Paper %B 3rd Open Classroom Conference, Balatonfured, Hungary %D 1999 %T The Information and Communication Technologies in Education %A Christos Bouras %A A Philopoulos %A D Fotakis %X In the majority of the advanced countries there are many educational school networks and even more and more schools are getting equipped with multimedia computers and connected to the Internet. Through the advancements of the personal computer and the Internet, the school of the future will find new strengths in both personalised and community learning environments. The prevailing perspective for the introduction of the Information and Communication Technologies can be characterised as the “computer as a tool”. However, as with all tools, effective use of the technology is embedded within practices and activities that realise its functionality for specific purposes and situations. On the other hand, the investigation of the relationship between practices, purposes, and situations and computer-based learning technologies is a major topic on pedagogic research. %B 3rd Open Classroom Conference, Balatonfured, Hungary %P 27 - 31 %8 25 - 26 March %G eng %0 Conference Paper %B IEEE Multimedia Systems'99, Special Session on European Projects, Florence, Italy %D 1999 %T Virtual European School-VES %A Christos Bouras %A Vaggelis Kapoulas %A A Koubek %A D Fotakis %A H Mayer %A H Rehatscheck %X The Virtual European School (VES) is an ongoing European project - funded by the Educational Multimedia Task Force Initiative of the European Union - with the aim to develop a comprehensive on-line resource of teaching material for secondary school education. The system will be fed by a group of smaller publishing houses from different European countries (Austria, Italy, Greece, Great Britain) specialised in educational material. The offer will contain multimedia material, CBT products, and also additional background materials, such as passages from schoolbooks, or Internet resources. The technical structure of the VES system will be based on Internet technologies, with interconnected VES servers in each participating region. The multimedia material will be stored in a database, with multi-lingual annotations for each project. There exist three user groups within the VES: publishers, teachers and pupils. %B IEEE Multimedia Systems'99, Special Session on European Projects, Florence, Italy %P 1055 - 1057 %8 7 - 11 June %G eng %0 Conference Paper %B 4th International Conference on Virtual Systems and Multimedia, Gifu, Japan, Vol. 2 %D 1998 %T A Distributed Virtual Learning Center in Cyberspace %A Christos Bouras %A A Philopoulos %A D Fotakis %X In this paper, we present a user-friendly 3D Distributed Virtual Environment (DVE) that would be used for on-line access to educational multimedia material over the Internet. We design and develop this application and the corresponding Graphical User Interface (GUI) in the framework of the European project “Virtual European School” (VES) whose aim is to develop a comprehensive resource of teaching material for secondary school education and to provide access to this material over Internet. It is a web-based application that is being developed as a client/server architecture using standard protocols and technologies such as TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML, Java and appropriate 3D formats. %B 4th International Conference on Virtual Systems and Multimedia, Gifu, Japan, Vol. 2 %P 410 - 415 %8 18 - 20 November %G eng %0 Conference Paper %B Open Classroom II Conference, Crete, Greece %D 1997 %T Major Principles on the Design of an Educational Network %A Christos Bouras %A Agis Konidaris %A Afroditi Sevasti %A S Kontogiannis %A D Fotakis %A A Katanou %A E Stephanou %X The modern communication networks, apart from the specialized applications that they offer depending on the nature of their target groups, they support a set of general purpose elementary network services, that provide some essential communication facilities to the end users. Regarding an educational network, these facilities include collaboration, navigation into the information resources, as well as interpersonal communication, to the members of the Education Society. In the sequel the major principles on providing these elementary network services are presented. On-lline/off-line contact over an alternative means of communication among the members of the trans-European Education Society could be an adequate reason for the deployment of an educational communication network. This category of services will offer the members of the Education Society the ability of exchanging opinions on educational and social matters, as well as interpersonal messages, and collaborating. These facilities should be provided by already existing network services, enhanced where necessary by supporting multimedia information exchange (mostly off-line). In the latter case external media players of attachment viewers may be used for the presentation of the multiple media of information. %B Open Classroom II Conference, Crete, Greece %P 359 - 366 %8 17 - 19 September %G eng %0 Journal Article %J Journal of Educational Technology Review - ETR, AACE, No. 7 %D 1997 %T Using Multimedia/Hypermedia Tools over Networks for Distance Education and Training %A Christos Bouras %A Vaggelis Kapoulas %A Paul Spirakis %A P Lampsas %A A Tatakis %A S Kontogiannis %A D Fotakis %X The rapid developments in the Information Technology sector as well as the deployment of faster networks brings us to the era of the New Information Technology (NIT). The citizen of the near future must be able to use them else he will be seriously handicapped in his everyday life. Thus NIT becomes part of the educational process while on the other hand offers the tools and the infrastructure for the establishment of the distance education process. The educators are one of the first professions that must learn to use NIT and its tools. Multimedia/hypermedia tools offer solutions to the problems posed by the distance education process. They can be user-friendly and enticing and they can cover most, if not all, the needs of their users. A lot of prototype systems (tools) for distance education have been developed, each offering a number of functions that aid the process of distance education. The rapid growth of World Wide Web is adding another factor that can lead to the wider deployment of distance education systems. Although the value of distance education is unquestionable there is still a lot of work to be done before a wide spread implementation platform emerges. %B Journal of Educational Technology Review - ETR, AACE, No. 7 %P 20 - 26 %8 Summer %G eng %0 Conference Paper %B 1996 Concurrent Engineering Europe, Cambridge, UK %D 1996 %T FINE:Implementation of a Distributed Telematics Environment for Clinical Engineers %A Christos Bouras %A Vaggelis Kapoulas %A Paul Spirakis %A A Tatakis %A D Fotakis %A P Balaouras %A L Chadelis %A N Palikarakis %A R Sandalatzopoulos %B 1996 Concurrent Engineering Europe, Cambridge, UK %P 56 - 60 %8 10 -12 April %G eng %0 Conference Paper %B ED-TELECOM 96, Boston, USA %D 1996 %T An Interactive Cooperative Teleworking Environment-Tηλεµάθεια ∗ %A Christos Bouras %A Vaggelis Kapoulas %A Paul Spirakis %A P Lampsas %A A Tatakis %A S Kontogiannis %A D Fotakis %A K Kyriakou %X

In this paper we present the design and the implementation of an interactive environment for cooperative teleworking. Telemathea offers tools that support the communication and the teleworking between tutor and trainee, who may reside in remote geographical regions. This environment offers audio communication over the network as well as support for joint editing of text documents and still images. It supports different audio coding techniques so as to adjust to the available bandwidth, and makes use of the RTP protocol in order to facilitate the exchange of audio and, in the future, video packets.

%B ED-TELECOM 96, Boston, USA %P 37 - 42 %8 17 - 22 June %G eng %0 Conference Paper %B ED-MEDIA 95, Gratz, Austria %D 1995 %T HIPPOCRATES: A multimedia tool for distance education %A Christos Bouras %A Vaggelis Kapoulas %A Paul Spirakis %A P Lampsas %A A Tatakis %A D Fotakis %A G Papoutsopoulos %X In this paper we present a software tool for the realisation of the distance education service, that is the conduction of classes through the use of computers. The classes are directed towards personnel in various areas and aim at the retraining and update of the personnel in subjects of special interest in their line of work. The conduction of classes takes place, from and towards, remote regions with the aid of a computer network. Hippocrates is a flexible and easy-to-use application, which permits students, who sit in front of remotely situated workstations, to attend classes or seminars given by a teacher or expert, who can also be located in some remote geographical area. Hippocrates can be thought of as a distributed transparency projector. The teacher can project transparencies on the screens of the students’ workstations and can emphasize or indicate regions of interest on them by using the graphical tools offered by Hippocrates. Immediate results of the use of Hippocrates are the fast updating of the personnel in remote areas and the upgrading of the quality of the services they offer. %B ED-MEDIA 95, Gratz, Austria %P 103 - 108 %8 17 - 21 June %G eng %0 Conference Paper %B 10th International Symposium on Computers and Information Sciences-ISCIS X, Izmir, Turkey %D 1995 %T Multilingual Implementations of OSI Applications %A Christos Bouras %A Vaggelis Kapoulas %A Paul Spirakis %A P Lampsas %A A Tatakis %A S Kontogiannis %A D Fotakis %X In this work the problem of supporting multilingual environments over OSI applications is addressed. Initially a solution based on the idea of using multilingual structures and transcription techniques is presented. Another solution based on the major principles of the former follows, which exploits the coding of all of character sets uniformally. %B 10th International Symposium on Computers and Information Sciences-ISCIS X, Izmir, Turkey %P 367 - 374 %8 30 October - 1 November %G eng