The Romanian Internet Learning Workshop was conceived by Dr. Mihai Jalobeanu Head of the Computer and Communications Laboratory at The Institute of Isotopic and Molecular Technology, Cluj as a means of gathering together software developers and educators involved in internet supported teaching and learning. The need to bring together the expertise of educators and course designers with technical know-how is widespread as the internet begins to expand as a new territory of open and distance learning. Many universities have already accumulated experience in developing intranets and alternative means of supporting and delivering courses to their students. Romania is in a particularly interesting position as internet access is just beginning to open up and there are a number universities with a concentration of high calibre software developers. Specialist from a number of countries who met at The Romanian Open Systems in Bucharest October 1996 and The First Turkish Distance Education Conference in Ankara, November 1996 gave strong support for a meeting in Romania.

The workshop which took place 9 - 14 June 1997 at the KIDA Youth Centre in the village of Ilieni was organised by The Polygon Society, an international foundation initiated in Romania to promote cultural exchange, together with The Universities of Cluj and Turgu Mures, the Institute for Isotopic and Molecular Technology, Cluj and Romanian representative of the UK's Open University - CODECS based in Bucharest. The event was sponsored by a number of private and public organisations including the Romanian Ministry of Research and Technology and the Soros Foundation for an Open Society.

The conference looked at a number of initiatives in internet supported teaching at secondary as well as university level. There were also presentations and discussion about broad implications of the internet medium for education and prospects for extending the educational use of the internet in Romania. Participation was diverse with specialists from ten countries including researchers looking at the dynamics of virtual learning environments and teachers and course designers who are using the internet as a source of information and as a medium for communication.

A number of packages were presented for automatically laying up databases of course materials and marking students' test responses on line. Dr. Jennifer Lennon (jennifer@cs.auckland.ac.nz) of University of Auckland described a sophisticated environment in which the Masters level Hypermedia course is delivered electronically. The package is based around the HyperWave package developed in Graz, Austria. The Auckland intranet allows teachers to define hypertext pathways specific to particular students or groups of students. Lecturer and students can discuss the course notes by adding annotations specific to a particular individual.

Bela Erdelyi (erdelyib@pilot.msu.edu) presented a specialist course in Beam Physics. Experts in this highly specialist domain, at Michigan State University are able to reach their catchment which is spread over some 25 sites in different countries by a combination of video conferencing, real-audio and real-video. Lecture notes and a grading system is also offered over the internet. This course is able to reach many more students more cheaply than the conventional biannual two week course offered by the US Particle Accelerator School.

Communication over large distances with teachers and between learners is perhaps the most powerful educational use of the internet. William Lindsay from Strathclyde University described an initiative which enables him to 'visit' trainee teachers by video conference link to their teaching practice schools - often in the most distant reaches of the Scottish highlands. Cornelia Platon (nelly@lcjdap.soroscj.ro) from a the "Alexandru Papiu Ilarian" High school in the Romanian city of Dej outlined collaborative creative writing projects her pupils are involved in through "Learning Circles" within the I*EARN (International Education and Resource Network). Pupils are clearly strongly motivated when they have colleagues in other cultures to write for.

A number of participants described the way that their work as educators has been enriched by the encyclopaedic diversity of data and teaching materials available on the internet. Dr. Mircea Rusu (mrusu@org.meganet.ro) from Bucharest University described his use of astronomy data from NASA and images from numerous internet courses which have been integrated the undergraduate astronomy course he has developed. Dimiter Dimitrov (DCD@VMEI.ACAD.BG) and Petrova Tzvetkov (UIP@VMEI.ACAD.BG) from the Technical University of Sofia presented the use of a variety of sources of meteorological images and data for teaching meteorology and remote sensing.

Serpil Yuruker and Aynur Uzer from the Turkish Directorate of Education through Film, Radio and Television presented an innovative nation- wide plan to network schools and provide high bandwidth access to an national Education Centre with a large bank of resources and a mobile electronic classroom. Apart from the Soros Foundation's computers in high schools project, there has been no sign in Romania of an initiative to address the need for the widespread connection of schools to the internet.

An important prerequisite for the development of internet learning in Romania will no doubt continue to be the training of educators and researchers. It was encouraging to hear about training initiatives which are already established. Cristina Nicolescu (ncristin@valhalla.racai.ro) described a particularly successful three day course offered to members of the Romanian Academy; largely young researchers in the Humanities. This course, funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation in New York, was attended by some 200 academics in 1996 who were also offered continuing access to the internet at the Centre for Advanced Research in Machine Learning.

There was also a visit to the Galaciuc Youth Centre in the county of Vrancea where teenage pupils have developed sophisticated Web pages for a number of private and public bodies. Foreign participants were also treated to a scenic journey through the Carpathian mountains and Saxon villages.

Conference facilities included PCs and an internet connection and there was sufficient time for informal demonstrations and discussion in between seminars. Participants also had the opportunity to seek advice and exchange ideas with other specialists - many of these discussions will no doubt continue by E-mail.

A frequent comment throughout the meeting was that opportunities for Internet based applications remain limited in Romania because of the low speed and unreliability of internet connections. There is an urgent need for a more robust higher band-width network infrastructure. A round table discussion for Radio Bucharest also highlighted the problem of raising awareness of the utility of the internet for education not least among policy makers. In Romania some of those who have limited experience of using the internet have shown a perversely pre-revolution attitude; suggesting that widespread access to information and communication is a dangerous threat to centralised order in society. Others have equated use of the internet to playing with computer games. Clearly some educating will be needed and a greater exchange of ideas with specialists before it is widely understood that the internet is a medium which must be discovered and exploited intelligently if Romania is to become economically competitive and keep up with other countries in the education sector in the next millennium.

The 1997 Romanian Internet Learning Workshop has no doubt made an important contribution in this direction.

Christopher Clark, UK