The 15th CARNet Users Conference CUC 2013, held under the title "Reach for Knowledge!“ from November 20th to 22nd, 2013 at Hotel Antunović in Zagreb, drew to its close. The Conference was organised by the Croatian Academic and Research Network – CARNet under the auspices of the President of the Republic of Croatia, Ivo Josipović, and the Ministry of Science, Education and Sports, as well as with the support of the City of Zagreb.
The notion that knowledge is indeed reachable was substantiated with a programme comprising 4 keynote lectures, 11 workshops, more than 30 peer-reviewed papers, a round table on the educational system computerisation process, along with several presentations by CARNet and its partners.
The main programme of the Conference was divided into six topics: Mobile Technology and Application, Digital Competences, Trends in Instruction, Research and Information Technology, Content Creation and Sharing, and Educational Institutions in the New Environment. A special programme topic was sys.trek, designed for system engineers working at CARNet member institutions, with 16 presentations and 3 workshops this year.
Continuing the well-established tradition, this year's CUC again provided its participants with a unique chance of seeing some of the most renowned experts in the field of information and communications technology and education. There were four invited lecturers who participated in the Conference, two of which deserve a special mention. Mr Bum-Coo Cho, Senior Vice President of Mobile Communications at Samsung, talked about the ways of inspiring new learning approaches. In addition, he presented the experiences derived from the Samsung Company's joint venture with CARNet on the Future Classroom project. The other notable invited lecturer is Prof. Ivica Puljak, PhD, from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Naval Architecture in Split, who explained to Conference participants some of the crucial problems in physics that continue to haunt scientists today still and discussed the hard work scientists had to do in order to bring about the discovery of the Higgs boson, by using the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN international institute in Switzerland.
The Conference was traditionally accompanied by the Webfestival, a competition of Web content authors. The topic of this year's competition was mobile web. Out of 35 entries submitted in the two categories as distinguished according to the author (i.e. Individual and Group of Authors), the Webfestival jury selected the following mobile webs as winners in the two categories: Hranko – sastojci su bitni (Individual category) and Mobilno Njuškalo (Group of Authors category). Along with these awards, the jury decided to give an honourable mention to the Apsurdistan mobile web.
What is more, CUC 2013 included ten special events. Worthy of a highlight are the Birds of a Feather meetings on upgrades to the e-Matica service and new educational services required by the CARNet users, as well as a presentation of eduKnjižara, the new CARNet service for online e-book and e-textbook distribution.
The best paper presented at the Conference, as selected by the international Programmes Committee, is titled "What we learn, what we expect, and what awaits us in view of digital competences," written by Mr Zoran Kovač from the High School of Ivan Zakmardi Dijankovečki in Križevci. The best presentation held at this year's conference was chosen by the participants themselves to be "Teaching upside-down - Flipped Classroom Model in elementary school", written by Predrag Dukić and Maja Kalebić from Vidikovac Elementary School in Pula.
The award for the most regular participant of the Conference, for which all the participants who registered for more than 75% of the lectures were nominated, went to Krešimir Ordanić from OŠ Oroslavje, while the award for taking the Conference survey was conferred to Domagoj Vuković from Faculty of Electrical Engineering in Osijek.
For yet another year in a row, a sys.trek competition was organized within the sys.trek section. The participants had to solve a prize puzzle which consisted of several steps, where Marko Meštrović from Knin University accomplished the greatest progress.
The Conference attracted 560 accredited participants, whereas the lectures were partially made available via video transfer on CARNet Media on Demand for those who did not take part in the Conference. The official language of the Conference was Croatian, but the foreign lecturers held their lectures in English.
REACH FOR KNOWLEDGE!
In this day and age it should be easy to reach for knowledge. Information is everywhere around us, in computer clouds, in our computers, accessible via mobile networks and different devices. However, in addition to technologies, applications and devices, we need competences in order to create knowledge from a multitude of information. Let us enjoy learning whenever we have a chance! We must follow world trends in application of technology in teaching, but we should not follow them blindly if we find them inappropriate. We must have access to scientific information, and we want to share the information which we create ourselves. We must present ourselves in digital world with our language, our heritage and our contemporary production, but we also must ensure the future of such contents, appropriate means for their publication and for protection of their authors.
We invite you to submit your papers and workshop proposals, thus joining us in the preparation of the 15th CARNet Users Conference, entitled "Reach for knowledge!", which will be held in Zagreb from 20th to 22nd November 2013. Select one of the topics which we included in the Conference programme because of their importance worldwide and in Croatia, because we can learn more about them and because they could be of interest to our users and to us in CARNet.
Read more about the topics of the Conference on the programme pages.
You can submit your workshop, scientific or technical paper proposals following this link: https://radovi.cuc.carnet.hr.
Additional information about the Conference can be obtained by e-mail: CUC@CARNet.hr.
