Proceedings of the third international ACM workshop on Multimedia technologies for distance learning

The organizing committee of the Third ACM International Workshop on Multimedia Technologies for Distance Learning (MTDL 2011) would like to welcome all of you to join the workshop as well as the ACM Multimedia Conference 2011. Education is considered as one of the most important social activities by all countries and governments, especially in the age of information exchange through the Internet. Distance learning technologies, although, still rely on educational professionals to have guidance, computer and communication technologies to help remove the time and space restrictions that exist in traditional learning. This MTDL workshop aims to discuss new contributions as well as practical experiences using computer and communication technologies. Especially, it looks at the differences of using and without using multimedia technologies for education. In general, multimedia technologies can help students learn in a more interesting way as compared to traditional education methods, with sound and various media. Some educational theories also suggest that a few special trainings can be constructed much more efficiently with the help from interactive multimedia. For instance, interactive simulation is useful in medical training. Additional technologies to fuse multidimensional information for e-learning are also interesting contributions from computer and sociological perspectives. On the other hand, interesting learning materials rely on good authoring technologies to combine learning activities for students. The materials for supporting these activities need to be located from local or a remote database and be retrieved efficiently. Therefore, how to search and rank learning objects from distance learning repositories has become not only a computer technologybased problem but also a communication issue. Communication technologies can also improve the attractiveness of social games and game-based learning. This year, we received a total of 9 papers from various countries. The program committee decided to accept 5 of them based on the paper quality and the relevancy. These papers are from France, India, Hong Kong, and China. Each paper was reviewed by at least three program committee members and discussed by the program committee co-chairs before acceptance. In addition to the regular submission session, we have also organized an invited session with three invited papers.