Letter to the Reader

We would like to start our service to you, our readers, by expressing our most sincere appreciation for your curiosity about this initiative. This project has finally taken shape after years of planning and countless communications among a significant number of people. In true modern fashion, even though we have been working together for years, we have no idea what most of those within our extended team look like. This fantastic world of technology once again enables us to produce significant works without the need of direct or even synchronous interaction. It is this very aspect of today’s global infrastructure that plays the most central role into this project: the ability of interacting socially through electronic media, focussing on research and practice applied to the modern classroom. Our interest in e-education stems from the pure curiosity of ‘how can we improve our teaching’ once we became faculty members, with a significant load of classes to manage every semester. Our initial studies were concentrating mainly in agent-based simulations and artificial intelligence, interests that are still deeply rooted within us and that we carry on exploring. It is the classroom aspect of our jobs that has led us to exploring new and more efficient ways to utilize technology in teaching. Whether we are carrying out office hours in multi-user virtual environments, letting the students review programming concepts until the very last minute before the exam through some online demonstration, or thinking about the next project, we are researchers and practitioners just like you. The pervasiveness of information systems keeps breaking its own records, as we get to a degree of connectivity that is continuously increasing. Although its presence is not uniform through the entire globe, the possibilities that this intercontinental infrastructure offers appear nearly endless. It is in the intersection where we find the niche of e-learning and e-education that attracts us the most. As teaching is one of the most ancient practices, it has witnessed innovation first-hand. Without education we couldn’t transmit our knowledge and discoveries to others; this practice has transferred innovation from one person to the next, effectively taking a predominant role in the history of humanity. For this very reason it is only fair that education should not just teach about modern infrastructures, but it should also get a well-deserved makeover through distance learning and teaching practices. The idea of e-education is one that goes well beyond what typical readers generally perceive. When we describe our work and research to our friends and family, they often assimilate the greater field of e-education to formal schools. This idea breaks free of the traditional scholastic paradigm and reaches people who are using the Internet to learn new notions, companies who are training new employees embarking on new and exciting careers, or children who cannot utilize the traditional instructional tools in the manner most people do. E-education affects not only learners, but also society, economics, psychology, and a countless array of other aspects of every-day life. It breaks barriers and levels of users of any age, race, or credo. The ICST Transactions on e-Education and e-Learning aim at witnessing and reporting on the progress that this field is bound to walk from today’s explosive potential to tomorrow’s affective action. Just like any proud parent seeing their baby for the first time, we have very high hopes and dreams for this publication. We would like to share some of those with you. First of all, the multidisciplinary nature of e-education appeals to a greater audience. Given the interest that e-education has generated in the last few years, we are trying not to limit our audience to experts in the field of education or computing, but to a much larger audience. Our articles aim at conveying sometimes difficult concepts in a practical and replicable manner. The second aim of this publication is not to lose the true focus of any information technology infrastructure: the person. We are not working to advance the state of the art for Received on 14 June 2011