Session 1. “Education: Teaching Architecture in the Digital Age”

To a larger and larger extent learning objects become available via electronic means, in regular teaching environments as well as in learning modes besides and after graduation. Knowledge is out of date in five years time and grows so fast that regular teaching in school can not cope with this knowledge boom in a comprehensive way. Therefore academic teaching evolves into teaching of principles, methods, and attitudes, into a state of mind allowing lifelong learning (LLL). Subjects for LLL are produced by universities, practice, and industry. They are disseminated via conferences, short courses and more and more via e-learning formulas as has been the case in a lot of universities since many years.
Today materials for e-learning -called learning objects- are prepared by specialists, somewhere on earth, disseminated via electronic communication means and shared amongst distant users. E-repositories play a role of growing importance in this context and this session of the conference focuses on the role of e-repositories in LLL in architecture.

The Venice conference offers the opportunity to discuss experiences and research either on the following topics or related ones:
• Teaching and learning architecture using e-learning tools and/or digital resources
• Teaching and learning attitudes triggered by digital environments
• E-repositories for e-learning and life long learning purposes: how to structure their contents
• Tools to navigate e-repositories
• Tools for e-learning purposes
• Use cases on e-learning architectural environment

Chairman: Mario Santana Quintero (Belgium)
Speakers: Antonino Saggio (Italy) - Stefan Apelt, Christian Prause (Germany), Mathias Casaer, Ann Heylighen (Belgium) - Susanne Schumacher (Switzerland) - Leandro Madrazo (Spain), Paul Riddy (United Kingdom), Luca Botturi (Switzerland) - Verdy Kwee (The United Arab Emirates) - Giovanni De Paoli, Nada El-Khoury (Canada) - Adriane Borda Almeida da Silva, Neusa Felix, Luisa Dalla Vecchia, Janice Pires (Brazil) - Vladimir Bazajac (USA), Ezio Arlati (Italy) - Andy Earl, Dr Carl O’Coil, Joss Winn (United Kingdom) - Francesca Torello, Marie Norman (USA)

Session 2. “Digital Architectural Archives: Preservation, Dissemination and Use”

There are two kinds of digital archives, spontaneous archives, provided by contemporary architectural firms which use computers throughout the whole design process, and the “old” paper archives, which have gradually being transferred to digital media in order to preserve them and to enhance their diffusion. Both archives may provide useful first hand information that has to be improved and opened to a large public of scholars, archivists, and professionals. Yet, spreading these archives to a general public poses some problems. In spontaneous archives, each document (presentation, 2D - 3D drawings, animations, renderings, pictures, videos, texts, etc.) has its own format, and needs a specific program to be opened; information contained in each document is frequently layered, in fact each file can contain texts, images, animations, pictures, hyperlink, etc. at the same time. Paper archives raise the following questions: the dilemma of what file format has to be used when transferring the information contained in the original paper document to the digital one; the problem on how to make the chosen file formats sustainable knowing that each year new ones blossom.
Finally, nowadays, neither of both archives have any standard, or shared recommendation in order to classify and tag documents, nor advanced and powerful search tools capable of guiding users through a great deal of resources and information.

The Venice conference provides the opportunity to discuss either the following topics or related ones:
• Archiving standards
• Navigation tools
• Interoperability
• Multilingual and multicultural approaches
• Dissemination and use of digital archives
• IPR
• Use cases

Chairman: Alberto Giretti (Italy)
Speakers: Patricia Alkhoven (The Netherlands) - Riccardo Domenichini (Italy) - Florence Wierre (France) - Elena Triunveri (Switzerland) - Paola Ricco (Italy) - Emanuele Quintarelli, Andrea Resmini, Luca Rosati (Italy) - Hong Zhang (China) - Bernhard Franken, Berthold Scharrer, Suemri Vogel (Germany) - Sara Scapicchio (Italy) - Ina Blümel, Harald Krottmaier, Raoul Wessel (Germany).

Session 3. “An European Network of Architectural Contents”

Websites and portals devoted to architecture and websites of professional architects have a considerable amount of resources (pictures, renderings, 2D-3D drawings, details, texts, videos animations, information) continuously updated and enriched. However this material is often disorganized, poorly structured, not properly tagged, and has no advanced and coherent search systems enabling cross-referencing among the available documents. As a lot of very interesting resources often remain inoperative and useless, lost in the abyss of (sometimes unknown) databases.
Moreover, very often, each website is an isle on the Internet that does not communicate with its brothers and sisters and remains alone with a lot of difficulties to survive, renovate, and update tools and the way contents are provided and organized.

The Venice conference is the first international meeting of architectural portals, summoning directors and/or founders of major European websites, in order to discuss all together either the following topics or related ones:

• Information architecture and knowledge organization of contents
• Which contents for what kind of people and purposes
• Interfaces, searching, and browsing tools
• Architectural portals and their goals
• User communities and web 2.0
• Interoperability
• Multilingual and multicultural approaches
• IPR
• Use cases
• Feasibility, implementations and viability of a super-network of shared e-repositories from different websites
• Implementation of virtual super-networks and impacts on the original repository

Chairman: Furio Barzon (Italy)
Speakers: Marco Brizzi (Italy) - Mieke Vullings, Naomi Schiphorst (The Netherlands) - John Jourden (USA) - Charles Ganz (Switzerland), world-architects - Juerg Meister (Austria) - Paolo Cancellato (Italy) - Francisco Agostinho (Portugal) - Stefan Boeykens (Belgium) - Mario Santana Quintero (Belgium), Alonzo Addison, Marta Severo (France)