The five high schools in the Tohoku Area, including the participating schools in `100-school Networking Project' gave a demonstration of their debate class using communication media in the 22th All Japan Meet of Japan Association for Educational Technology. This attempt was the first such event in Japan. In order to make their presentation, the students and the teachers at each school prepared for it using such Internet services as Mailing List, CU-SeeMe and IRC. Also, on the day of presentation, a television conference system and Internet chat were used. I will report on what we did and how we did it. I will also talk about some of the problems we encountered and give some ideas for future activities.

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In Japan, computer has been actively used for education of the handicapped children in special schools. In the field of special education, computers began to be used in the style of multimedia at the early years. For what purpose and how to apply multimedia technology to special education is distinctive for each disability of students. In schools for the blind and for the deaf, computer is frequently used for compensation of visual and hearing disabilities; in schools for the physically handicapped, as a tool facilitating expression of disabled children's intention with a variety of augmentative/alternate input devices; in schools for the health impaired, with courseware materials of subjects; in schools for the mentally retarded, for arousing motivation to learning with computer itself. Ready-made courseware is mainly used, but teacher-made ones less frequently.

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This is the age of multimedia. NTT has organized a project named"Nature and Multimedia", hoping that everyone will feel closer to nature. This project serves providing various information quickly and easily by using ordinary telecommunications means. The distinctive characteristic of our service lies in the interactive communication way; people who are interested in nature and enjoy our contents as subscribers can also contribute their own information as participants. Another characteristic is that people can use various telecommunications means, from advanced the Internet to more familiar tools such as facsimile or telephone. Our project has received good public responses of many fields, including school or social education. We are further extending our services by adding wider-ranged information such as environment, tradition and locality to the original content of nature. Consequently, we believe this project contributes to increasing the opportunity of participating-style education.

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A digital museum project is underway to build a new museum that takes full advantage of the current computer technology. The aim of the project is to make the museum more accessible and preservation of various material in digital form forever, and at the same time making such data accessible to researchers and ordinary visitors. The current research includes the use of MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) that uses virtual reality environment, computer enhanced environment in which many computers are laid out to offer improved services such as modifying the display or narration by picking up user preferences automatically via infrared communication. These practices are at the cutting edge of application of the multimedia technology in the museum world. Also, we have been digitizing available specimen into multimedia data, and provide the information as hyperlinked multimedia data so that we can provide it to the world community. The digitization and editing will continue for some time.

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As recent trends of the"Museum" which is public service facility, research of the"Display" technology which is a fundamental function of having applied ultra high density vision, multimedia, virtual reality (VR) and so on is forwarded. We introduce computer graphics (CG), digital image system (DIS) and the"Viewseum" of our company's Internet art museum, which are expected to apply to exhibition technologies. In addition, we introduce the recent cases of our company which put these technologies to practical use.

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Japan Science and Technology Corporation (JST) was started the business of public understanding of science and technology when it was established in October. 1996. Public understanding of science and technology is activities in which it can be felt to be familiar with science and technology for many people. As for public understanding of science and technology, multimedia gives a way for expressing various scientific phenomena. The author describe that it should be planned to virtual science museum with computergraphics, internet QA plaza and science channel in JST.

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The age of global networks facilitating the distribution of digital information will mandate the international harmonization of relevant legal remedies as well as the development and deployment of technologies to make such remedies effective. This paper starts with a brief description of the recent progress for international harmonization of the copyright laws, and discusses functional requirements and various technologies for realizing electronic copyright management systems. It also outlines several systems developed in Japan, USA and Europe. Further activities are required for development and standardization to realize interoperability among the systems, payment of license fees, and other needs.

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