EDM’08 Aftermath

The heavy white book is already on my shelf, and now citations are possible. However, EDM’08 is, of course, much more than “(Baker, Barnes, & Beck, 2008)”. The wonderful two days of EDM’08 are behind us, and this is the time to do the aftermath.

First of all, cheers to the initiators and the organizers for a very-well-done conference (for the fillet we had in the first night’s banquet, “medium” was the perfect measure, however for a conference - ”very-well-done” is indeed a compliment . Interesting studies, good presentations, nice people, well-served food, beautiful location, and above all – the atmosphere, ho the atmosphere. Something new is being formed, and we are there, at the very first moments of this creation.

For now, I’d like to focus on what I may title: Bridges Over Interdisciplinarity. As far as I see it, this (i.e., the lack of them) is the main problem of our emerging domain.

The very nature of EDM is to be interdisciplinar. Just like “Bioinformatics”, “Computational Statistics”, “Music Information Retrieval”, or “Econophysics” – the name of our research area defines the two extremely-different fields that (together with some others) should synergically form a new one. However, it seems that “Education” and “Data Mining” are not yet equal in this merging equation, and that the latter is much more dominant than expected.

If EDM’08 was a reflection of the current world-wide EDM research (and I believe it was indeed), than it seems that it may be metaphorised as being built of two isolated islands: The “Education Island” (EI) and the “Data Mining Island” (DMI), and that some tour-ferries often depart from DMI towards EI, but always – as ferries do – get back home before sunset. Having two distinct islands is not the problem; the transportation between them is the main issue. Instead of the current situation, I’d prefer to see a wide, steady bridge being built, enabling a full-speed drive road between the islands.

Most of the questions asked in the CFP were of that highway-between-islands type, e.g.:

• Can we use our discoveries to improve the software’s effectiveness?
• Student learning data provides a powerful mechanism for determining which teaching actions are successful. How can we best use such data?
• Can we use existing educational and psychological knowledge to better focus our search?

However, to my own opinion, many of the conference articles do not discuss such in-between questions, but rather taking only one side, choosing to settle only on one of the islands.

If EDM’08 is the mirror (and, as I mentioned before, I think it is indeed) – we are the ones who should carefully look at it. We should understand the current situation and ask ourselves if this is the desired one. Possible answers are mainly: “Sure!”, “Nay!”, “Don’t know”; and no matter what your own answer is, talking about it might help in laying down the constructions of the desired bridge. Furthermore, it might help in understanding if such a bridge is needed needed.

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EDM’08 is behind us. EDM’09 is already “in the oven” (July 1-3, Cordoba, Spain). It took them only about 2 years to build the largest bridge in the world (Burapha Withi Expressway, Bangkok, Thailand). Will we finish our until EDM’10?