VIS-COM-71 was organised by ICOGRADA as a Conference on visual communication in teaching and learning.
THE Imperial Palace of the Emperor Franz-Joseph - once the most powerful throne in Europe - was the sumptuous setting for the 700 educators, designers, hardware manufacturers and software producers attending VIS-COM '71. If you can imagine it, the effect was a bit like having Film '71 staged in Blenheim Palace and produced by Hollywood. The psychological impact of all this grandeur was noticeable from the start, for the aims of the Congress were no less grand. After the official opening by the President of Austria, these aims were defined by ICOGRADA's President, John Halas, as a bold attempt to bridge five gaps - between the sophisticated communications industry and the teachers; between electronic technology and schools; between the educational budgets of developed and underdeveloped countries; between the schoolchild's perception in the age of TV and that of the textbook-oriented teacher; and between the makers of hardware and the producers and users of software. To achieve these aims a gigantic job of co-ordination would be needed which VIS-COM '71 could help to initiate by bringing all these differing interests together and encouraging them to co-operate more. Well, of course, what emerged was that the gaps are actually getting wider and wider faster and faster, and it looks as if even Franz-Joseph himself wouldn't have been able to do anything about it. Meanwhile, we who are in the communications business have already been under pressure to widen our horizons for some years, but the first message from VIS-COM '71 seems to tell us to widen them still further.
Unfortunately, the Congress came at a time in the calendar when the aftermath and excitement of Film '71 had far from died down - so it would not be surprising if such a significant event should have escaped the attention of many of the Society's Members who were not lucky or cunning enough to make the trip to Vienna. The first part of this report is therefore concerned with giving as comprehensive an outline as possible of all the papers and events which may be of interest to readers; these notes will place emphasis on motion-picture and TV usage, and are presented in chronological order. Only in the second part of this report shall I attempt to construct any observations or conclusions from the complex pattern of information and argument.
Most of the hardware on display will be familiar to readers. However, apart from items already described, I should mention the Philips PIP (Programmed Individual Presentations) system in which a film cassette projector is controlled by pulses on the unused track of an accompanying but separate sound cassette; this allows the film to be slowed down or stopped for pre-determined periods during the presentation. Also from Philips is the Colour TV Organ, a system whereby a monochrome design sketch can be displayed on a monitor and coloured according to any desired scheme. This is intended as a visualisation aid for designers and art directors.
This article is the second of a two-part report on the recent ICOGRADA Congress in Vienna, and describes some of the important issues raised by the speakers.
WE WHO ARE INVOLVED in the technical and creative sides of the communications industry have traditionally paid little attention to the problems of education, unless we have been specifically engaged on a job or film or programme of an educational nature. Meanwhile, educationalists have been increasingly taking to audiovisual media, frequently on their own initiative. This movement has now grown so large that it virtually constitutes an alternative communications industry, and one of the clearest themes to emerge from VIS-COM '71 was the fear that unless we can effect a marriage of these two industries, educational progress will fall far behind technological progress with ultimately catastrophic results for mankind.
It is fair to say that VIS-COM '71 was not a technological Congress in the way that Film '71 was. There was little actual news of a hard factual kind. Out of 32 papers delivered, at least 21 dealt with philosophical themes, or else reported on projects whose main interest was their philosophical basis; and there was a strong philosophical element in many of the remainder. For us in the communications business, the relevance of all this philosophy seems to be roughly this: our technological media have been invading the classroom steadily for a number of years; there, however, these techniques have been turned inside out to create new concepts of media usage, and under this onslaught the very walls of the classroom are breaking down; as a result, these new concepts are being thrown back at us and will ultimately bring about changes for all of us in all media. As the barriers are demolished, so we all become involved in education. Of course, grasping a generalisation of this nature is one thing; actually understanding what it implies in concrete terms is quite another. Most of the energy of debate was directed towards creating such an understanding, but the variety of answers was conflicting and confusing, only the vaguest general conclusions could be drawn. Designers and educationalists alike were baffled and perplexed, caught between the excitement of the general challenge, and the apparent anarchy of the situation they were expected to control. There were definite signs that the media men were losing their cool, in some cases one sensed panic almost approaching hysteria - and the dilemma was particularly acute for the students. Asa Briggs, in his summing-up, caught the feeling in characteristic fashion: we are in the front line ... exciting, even if uncomfortable .. ..
The extent of this discomfort can be gauged from the remarkable way that many speakers contradicted other speakers, and yet nobody noticed. Partly this is because the contradictions were often quite complex. Let me illustrate this with the example of a three-way contradiction generated between Patrick Murphy, Ake Edfelt and Knut Yran.
Knut Yran was the initiator of the Philips TELL project. As can be seen in the illustration, this consists of a teacher's desk facing a number of pupils' desks. From his desk the teacher can select different pre-designed taped programmes for transmission to monitors in the pupils' desks. He can also transmit pointing or sketching comments via his own desk camera. Different groups 1n the class may have different video cassettes directed at them, but the number of channels is limited, so it is far from possible to present a different programme to each pupil. The teacher also has a direct two-way audio link with the pupils. The system is designed to serve all ages of pupil from young children to adults, and can therefore be used intensively throughout the day to maximise economic efficiency.
Ake Edfelt is a leader of research into the psychology of adult education. At first, he explains, adult education was thought to be like child education, but more intense. This idea, however, was quickly abandoned; it was found that adults soon get restless, just the same as children. You can't just hand over a mass of facts, you must consider the adult student's specific situation and adjust the teaching to it. Yet, says Edfelt, there are educational experts today who still hold that there is nothing that could be specifically called adult education. To them there is just one general modern educational theory. Edfelt then draws two main differences between child and adult education: (a) the ability to learn meaningless material deteriorates with age, but the ability to learn meaningful material increases; the adult has wider frames of reference; (b) the adult is an intentional learner who knows what he wants to learn. children seldom are concerned with the specific objectives of a course of study. Consequently adults must be given free opportunities to learn at their own pace along their own lines towards their own individually chosen goals.
Patrick Murphy described the idea behind the modern concept of child-centred education. which is being increasingly applied in our schools. The child is free to set his own goals; he has free access to equipment, and can project a film on his own just as he can read a book. He can move around freely. and approach any individual who may be able to assist him. He sets his own pace and level, determined by his own personal enjoyment of the learning situation; the teacher acts as a kind of nurse, ready to pounce to ensure that the child is getting everything he possibly can from the learning situation.
You don't need to know anything about education to see the logical inconsistencies being generated here. If Patrick Murphy is right, then the TELL system can have no place in modern child-education; the system is based on the traditional static concept of teacher and pupil which is totally incompatible with the fluid dynamics of child-centred education. If Edfelt is right. then adult education requires the same fluid dynamics, and the TELL system is obsolete here also. If Edfelt is right about adult education, and if Murphy is right about child-education, then the principles of child-education are basically the same as those of adult education, and Edfelt is therefor wrong about child-education; according to Murphy, it is only in traditional child-education that children seldom are concerned with objectives. When encouraged to be so concerned in a child-centred situation, children follow learning behaviour patterns similar to those described by Edfelt for adults On the other hand, do we need schools at all? The TELL system is visualised like a traditional classroom, yet there is no need for pupils' and teachers desks to be in the same building at all, or even the same city, but no-one spotted this point. It could mean that the real function of the TELL system would be something quite different from regular education.
Is it any wonder that people are baffled? I have dwelt on this example in some detail because it shows quite clearly the kind of conflict that can occur between experts. But how are we to assess all this? In the absence of a clear direction, we can only make probabalistic judgements. For example, we might say (a) the Philips work is experimental, and therefore has a built-in risk of being wrong: (b) Edfelt is an expert on adult education, so his remarks on child-education may be criticised without casting doubts on his main work: (c) Patrick Murphy's work is born of considerable practical experience of an approach which is actually becoming common in schools today. These three judgements are enough to make sense of the conflicting material. However, such probabalistic judgements necessarily contain a subjective element. As a result, different people can reach different conclusions.
Our example dealt with three speakers, and was complicated enough. Multiply this many times and the task gets quite unmanageable. Gunter Herlt produced a statistic which emphasises the scale of the problem: in 1955, 25% of the gross social production of the USA went into the dissemination of knowledge and information. In 1965 the figure was 33%, and before the end of the seventies it will reach 50%. Herlt also quoted an American communications expert, Dallas Smythe, who compared the achievements of a highly developed system of information and communications with nuclear power: just like nuclear research, mass media must falter between the two possibilities of construction and destruction.
One speaker who did attempt an overall analysis of the changing situation was Borden Mace. He examined the progress of various media in statistical terms, comparing the relative growth of print, micrographics. TV and other audio-visual systems. Such an analysis can produce surprising results, with far-reaching implications for the future. For example, children in the USA watch on average 20,000 hours of television before the age of twelve - more than they spend with either their parents or their teachers. Borden Mace projected his conclusions to produce an image of the future whereby learning would take place in a room equipped with TV in one corner, a computer terminal at the side, printed material on the table and a manipulative device in another corner. This image could also be seen as a logical development from the TELL system.
Borden Mace also raised one of the biggest technical bottlenecks - the lack of standardisation in video-recording systems. This issue loomed large at the Congress. The impatience of many with the slowness of any drive to tackle this problem was opposed by those who agreed with Dr Hubalek that premature standardisation would set restrictive limitations: he urged the support of free research, in which only the proven best systems would be adopted. John Halas pointed out that a conference on the problem was due to be staged in Paris on 9-10 November this year. Roy Harris set the problem in perspective with a useful comprehensive survey of the various systems actually existing, and pointed out the advantages of 8mm film as the most universal of present standards. In his survey, he emphasised the tree-like structure of technological development, arguing that this should be regarded as an evolutionary process, and that therefore all talk of audiovisual revolution is at best an exaggeration.
With this assertion Roy Harris accurately put his finger on the centre of the philosophical crisis - evolution or revolution? Undoubtedly there was majority support for the assertion that a real revolution was under way, but since no-one attempted to define what they meant by revolution, there was no answer to Roy Harris's contradictory assertion. Considering the amount of intellectual energy being devoted to this question, the omission seems surprising - but this is a typical symptom of the widely-felt intellectual paralysis that the American author Alvin Toffler has encapsulated so neatly in his phrase future shock- the future is arriving too fast, and its arrival is not properly co-ordinated.
Almost everyone was in agreement with Toffler's comment - but how can we expect to cope with the future if we can't even decide what we mean when we talk about revolution and can't agree whether one is occurring or not? This is the question that lifts the problem out of the realm of philosophical speculation and gives it an immediate practical urgency.
An examination of Roy Harris's evolution not revolution thesis might help to shed some light. Obviously, there can be nothing wrong with drawing attention to the tree-like structure of photographic progress. The danger lies in drawing conclusions from such an observation. It is, after all, a pure analogy, and giving it the label evolution is another analogy. Analogical thinking is full of pitfalls. To say that technical progress is like a tree, is no reason for saying that there can't be changes we would unhesitatingly call revolutionary. You might just as well counter this by saying that if you follow up the wooden trunk and branches of a tree you will eventually come to something revolutionary - green leaves! Logically speaking, this is no sillier than any other analogical argument. It is a fatal mistake to build upon resemblances between unrelated things, however useful they may be initially as an aid to visualisation.
The evolution and tree analogies therefore do not affect the central issue - where is the revolution? We are clearly not talking - most of us anyway - about some Guevara-style upheaval. However, one would expect the students to have something to say at this point; in fact, the nearest thing to a concrete proposal came from Professor Herb Roan, who was unofficial (and apparently self-appointed) spokesman for the younger generation. He invited everyone to participate in an alternative global society based on a computerised satellite network for information exchange. Now, perhaps there is a good chance that such a thing will eventually come about, but it obviously won't happen overnight. However, it is reasonable to suspect that the revolutionary images of the students might be somehow related to the problematical revolution in the communications industry, if only we could define it precisely. The paradox is that young people - who are least committed to the status quo - generally find their revolutionary image totally incompatible with existing industrial structure and therefore place themselves outside it (often with open hostility) where they are able to exert little direct influence on it. Consequently, if a revolution is indeed happening within the communications business, it is happening without the benefit of a universally-accepted vision of the end result, and is being carried out largely by people who see their efforts mainly as contributions to improving the existing system rather than as steps to replacing it with an alternative. So here we are back again at square one - where is the revolution?
To answer this question we obviously need a sharper conceptual tool. The best attempt to provide one comes - surprisingly perhaps - from an American historian of science, Thomas Kuhn. He examined the history of science in the light of the observation that its progress is peppered with events which are all universally recognised to be revolutions of greater or lesser degrees of impact. The result of this study was a brilliant analysis of the nature, causes and consequences of revolutions in basic scientific concepts. The key to this analysis is Kuhn's concept of a paradigm. A paradigm - in the Kuhnian sense - is the set of unconscious or tacit assumptions which every scientist acquires through his practice and training, and which cannot be articulated explicitly. It is not the same as the explicit laws and rules which are held to be basic truths at the time, but is rather the unconsciously-learned framework of attitudes which defines the kind of perceptions and logic which the established community would regard as common sense, and which enables the explicit laws to be formulated. To put it another way, a paradigm is an implicit body of intertwined theoretical and methodological belief that permits selection, evaluation and criticism. If that body of belief is not already implicit in the collection of facts at hand, it must be externally supplied, perhaps by a current metaphysic, or by historical accident. Paradigms have two functions: they define the range of activities and problems considered significant, and they provide the intellectual tools with which to tackle them. All paradigms are by nature open- ended and to some extent arbitrary; consequently they are provisional, since the activities involved in extending the paradigm in its open-ended direction inevitably come up against inconsistencies sooner or later. For example, this happened to the paradigm of Newtonian science when attempts were made to measure the speed of the earth through the aether. As soon as this happens, the community enters a period of crisis. A paradigm crisis is characterised by a breakdown of the unanimity which normally attends successful extensions of the paradigm. Unconsciously, everyone tries to bolster up the paradigm by devising extensions which will solve the inconsistency. It is the unconscious nature of the paradigm which forces everyone to do this, since the paradigm comprises the only intellectual tools they possess. A great variety of different attempts may be devised, but none of them can be successful. Confusion, controversy and contradiction are therefore the characteristics of a paradigm crisis. The crisis continues until some upstart discovers that the old paradigm contains arbitrary assumptions which everyone had overlooked, and that by abandoning them a new paradigm can be created which reconciles the new data with the old in a revolutionary way. In the. light of the new paradigm, a new theory is put forward. This is what we call a revolutionary theory. The process doesn't stop there, however. Being born of a new paradigm, the new theory is misunderstood and resisted by most of the holders of the established paradigm, because to them it literally doesn't make sense. The paradigm itself, remember, cannot be communicated directly, because it is unconscious and unperceived, like water to a fish. The new theory must therefore go through a kind of missionary process, whereby it gradually gains adherents among the newly-trained and conversions from among the established. Eventually, the last strongholds of the old paradigm give way (or die out) and the new becomes established. This process often takes a generation or more to accomplish. The result is called a revolution.
The reason I have explained Kuhn's concept in such detail, of course, is that all available evidence from perceptual psychology points to the conclusion that this process is not unique to science, but is actually the universal method by which all of us form all our concepts, from birth; the concept of the paradigm and the nature of its cyclically recurring revolutions is therefore applicable to the analysis of all human activities.
Now we can immediately see what phase of the Kuhnian model most accurately describes the confused discussion and contradiction that was so much in evidence at VIS-COM '71. It is the paradigm crisis; and since the scope of the Congress touches all areas of human an activity, the paradigm that is at stake is no less than the total paradigm of our social awareness. This is perhaps the greatest paradigm crisis in civilization; its roots can be traced back to the start of the century. The inconsistencies of debate and thesis generated in the Congress can therefore be seen to fall into place as a natural symptom of a current cultural crisis. Moreover, we can draw another conclusion. We have described what we mean by revolution, and we can say that if we are in a period of paradigm crisis, it must follow that the new paradigm has not yet emerged; and that therefore the revolution has not yet begun. We are just preparing for it. The crisis will inevitably continue to get worse until the new paradigm does emerge; we should therefore do everything possible to encourage its emergence. The seeds of the new paradigm are always implicit in the old; what is required is an enormous perceptual twist of the kind we experience with an ambiguous drawing that at one moment looks like a vase, and then - click! - it looks like two profile faces. This will be achieved only by a questioning of our most fundamental assumptions and cherished beliefs, on the widest possible front.
I hope this explanation is enough to indicate that the paradigm concept does indeed give us a more incisive tool for the analysis of the crucial philosophical problems of visual communication. Almost all the speakers at VIS-COM '71 were in general agreement with the notion put forward in slightly different ways by F H K Henrion and Henry Cassirer - that these problems could not be solved with the traditional media of language and print, but that more sophisticated audio-visual tools had to be developed. The fundamental assumption of the Congress was that these tools could be developed by co-operation between designers, scientists and educators. Stated in this way, a paradox becomes evident: if we expect solutions to communications problems to come from such co-operation, we must be prepared for disappointments, or at best delays, because to do so successfully they will require the very tools we are asking them to invent! The barrier that hinders such co-operation is th inability of the specialist to communicate his own paradigms, and to understand the paradigms of other specialists. A new kind of audio-visual communications language is needed to overcome this barrier. If we are to resolve this crisis, we must cultivate individuals with broader paradigms. Or to put it in a more familiar metaphor, we cannot resolve the crisis merely by building bridges between specialisms; instead we must cultivate super-bridges of elastic which act not as a link, or even a series of links, but rather as a seamless network structure that covers all areas in the manner of a geodesic dome, and under which gaps cease to exist. In short, we must cultivate generalists. By this is meant an individual who combines the full professional insights of the scientist, the visual communicator and the educator in a single brain. The word insight is crucial: it is not enough merely to know that E=mc2; the generalist understands why this must be so. Such Leonardo-esque talents have traditionally been rare, but there are signs that they are on the increase. Traditional education has prevented us from cultivating them, but the situation is improving. We should try to make the best use of such talents - they hold the key to communications problems, since for them the barriers of specialism do not exist.
Perhaps this brings us to a point where we can begin to see a glimmer of optimism. Despite the conflicts, VIS-COM '71 was full of optimism. One suspects that much of this optimism was without foundation - often one felt its existence was the result of failure to perceive the real problems. Consequently it is heartening to find that a little optimism can still survive an analysis of such foundations, and of course is immeasurably strengthened thereby.
In the first part of this report I promised to devote an article to the subject of computer animation, particularly including the latest developments reported by Patrick Beatts. I hope to show that there is good reason for believing that this medium holds the greatest promise for the solution of the communications crisis, provided only that we can approach it with an attitude open to the deepest questioning of the fundamental values of the animated image. Dusan Vukotic and Sidney Goldsmith both had illuminating comments on this area, and I shall be including them in my survey. Deep searching enquiry into this new medium could prove a key factor in the ultimate emergence of the new paradigm. Meanwhile, since this article has been quite long enough already, let me leave you with an answer to the riddle posed in the title - Q: when is a revolution not a revolution? A: before it's a-rival!
It was F H K Henrion (UK) who really pinpointed the aim of the huge, sometimes cumbersome, VIS COM 71-a congress and exhibition on the Learning Industry. Many abstract concepts in art and science, he claimed, could be made clearer and conveyed through analogies, models and comparisons, not only in a visually exciting way but also in a way that was visually much clearer than if only words had been used, and in which eye and mind absorbed these new concepts simultaneously. It just was not good enough any longer to have the harassed professor or teacher do a second-rate production in chalk on a blackboard. Everyone was becoming more visual and soon, as Dr Henry Cassirer (UNESCO) was to point out, we would be just as appalled at visual illiteracy as verbal illiteracy.
It was the purpose of the congress to create awareness within the profession of graphic designers as much as among those concerned with producing the visual aids and their associated hardware. Much more was, in fact, to emerge from the congress - the limitations of the systems involved, the complexities of designing them, the incompatibilities, and new developments.
Putting the case for the educational planners. Professor Asa Briggs (University of Sussex) set educational developments leading to the present day in their historical perspective. To his mind there were two main reasons why all the educational opportunities of the past decade had not been taken up. The first was due to the gulf between the main body of teachers and the enthusiastic minority prepared to try out new things. The second was the reluctance among administrators and planners to invest scarce resources in developments which had an obvious element of risk about them whatever gains they promised in the long run. Now. however, the idea of lifelong education was providing a radical change in the overall concept of education.
Education under this concept, stated Professor Briggs, was not something which began at five and continued until the tribal rites of examinations and diplomas concluding secondary school or university life. For lifelong education, it was obviously impossible to continue with the traditional systems. The whole field of education must be re-examined and reorientated in both its contents and methods. This approach, he believed, pointed to a new conception after school, even a new design of a school, may be a new place for education in the home. It was within this setting that the new resources of educational technology would be considered.
The view of the educational psychologists came from Professor Ake Edfeldt (Stockholm). As if to answer Cassirer's call for a new approach to educational planning, Professor Edfeldt produced a 10-point total planning preparing and working procedure that offered the kind of scientific method, outlook and discipline needed to plan any kind of educational process - be it audio-visual aid, tactile aid or fully fledged course. He emphasised that the main differences between the child and the adult as a learner was that the adult goes into the learning situation with a lot more general and/or specific knowledge than does the child. This called for careful consideration under step 6 (see Table), especially in relation to phenomena of disturbance-sensorial competition and context rivalry. While it had long been thought that simultaneous audio and visual stimulation was essential or best, or at least not harmful, Edfeldt and his colleagues had found that it was indeed harmful. They found that the only simultaneous bisensorial or multisensorial stimulation that was not harmful during an audio-visual presentation was that in which the stimulation over different sensorial pathways was absolutely parallel. Sound, they discovered, was generally more disturbing than visual stimuli. Even the apparently harmless stimulation of music that goes with otherwise silent sequences of a TV programme could prove to be impairing the learning effects.
One of the central themes to emerge from the congress was the general educational superiority of educational drawings over photographs, and the fact that humour does not detract from the educational content of a film. Many of the ideas concerning the use of animation as an aid to teaching go back to early research by the Nuffield Foundation. The advantages that such techniques could offer were well demonstrated by Pat Murphy (University of London. Goldsmith's College) in mathematics teaching films on the history of counting, now diagrams, the ellipse. linear programming, and in the supreme Halas and Batchelor film on topology that put over in minutes a concept that would take weeks to put over by conventional teaching. Such use of animation in teaching was underscored by Ben Pockney (University of Surrey), when he described his visual methods for language teaching, and again by Professor Edfeldt.
Representing the publishers interest, Borden Mace (Doubleday Multimedia, USA) asserted that just as traditional publishing had refused to fade away on schedule, so had the audio-visual industry refused to grow on schedule. In the USA early growth had been encouraging: $1 million spent by schools and universities on audio-visual aids and equipment in 1945; $30 million in 1964; $55 million in 1965; $110 million in 1966; $135 million in 1969. Projector sales had remained static for some five years and prints were too expensive. A complete lack of standardisation of projectors, 8-mm film cartridges, and sound systems had all contributed, he believed, to this levelling off. He claimed to have seen 16 different systems offered from Austria, Germany, Japan and the United States for video, record, film, tape, disc and cassette. Again, there was still overwhelming reliance by educators on the written word, and all too often the visual material available was of poor quality. Added to this was the fact that the typed mimeographed or Xeroxed word, for example, now enabled everyone to become a publisher-while film makers had to be a somewhat richer breed.
The electronic media, agreed Mr Mace, were going to play an enormous role in the future. Obviously though, there should be more cooperation among the factions concerned, for this would ensure a more varied and flexible mix was obtained. The learning setting of the future would likely be a room with a TV screen in one corner, a manipulative device or module in another, a telephone/computer terminal nearby, and printed material on the table. Already the Network for Continuing Medical Education provided, in the United States and Canada, a free service linking some 500 medical schools and hospitals with the best in televised medical education and supplementary texts.
There was general agreement with Tom Davies (Humphries Laboratories, UK) that the main areas where audio-visual systems would, or at least should, play an effective role in the future were primary, secondary and tertiary education in the arts, the sciences and medical fields; training and retraining for industry; management training; sales organisations; and life enrichment (hobbies, sports, etc). At the present time, though claimed Mr Davies. the only system which knew no international or standardisation barrier was that which used photographic emulsion. Much of the standards confusion in the video-cassette field, as Roy Harris (Crosby Audio Visual Productions, UK) pointed out, derived from whether they had been made to go with the 625-line PAL system (Germany, Austria, UK), the 819-line Seecam (France), or the 525-line NTSC (USA, Canada, and Japan). As such, the video-cassettes were not interchangeable without reprocessing through expensive standards converters.
Film would obviously continue to be the most widely used audio-visual medium. Both Mr Harris and Mr Davies underscored the important role that Super-8mm film would likely play as an international medium. Certainly it would prove of significant importance to publishers of software materials, and was the most likely to penetrate through to developing countries. In fact, all too little was said at the congress about the future of audio-visual aids in the developing countries, and there was no official spokesman for such regions. Cassirer in his address, however, made the point that 8-mm camera and radio were presently giving the best results in such countries.
There was also general agreement about the real breakthrough that Philips had achieved with its system of Programmed Individual Presentations (PIP). This system combined both filmstrip, slide and motion picture in only 50 ft (3600 frames) in a cassette. The sound was carried on a separate sound cassette. The projector was programmed by an unused track in the sound cassette, thus controlling the hold of a picture or the motion speed of moving film (1-24 frames per second) in complete synchronisation with sound. Fifty feet of film in this system gave up to a 30 minute presentation. A skip-frame facility made it possible to include teaching details for several languages and to pick up just one to go with the required sound cassette. Likewise this facility could be used to provide various levels of learning. In the United States, said Roy Harris, Retention Communication Systems (RCS) did the same but with a different standard and with an endless loop cassette.
The congress had been conceived in a rather grander fashion-possibly with a view to harmonising it with the setting of the vast Baroque Throne Room of the Imperial Palace in Vienna. It was to have been a bold attempt to close all the gaps between the highly sophisticated communications industry and the teaching world, between the complexities of the electronics industry and world school systems, between educational budgets in the west compared with the developing countries, between the perception of a schoolchild growing up in a highly visual world, and the textbook orientated teacher, between the software and hardware manufacturers. As ICOGRADA president John Halas explained, the objective was to be achieved by bringing the various sectors together by encouraging them to develop their future activities in parallel instead of total isolation. Instead the congress could only highlight the fact that the gaps were widening, yet because it did so with a special focus on design. it was a valuable event. To weld many of the gaps now will require a succession of international congresses and agreements, and an international will the likes of which has not been seen before.