Yesterday, I had my second class in "Image Processing", and what makes this class a little special is that it is conducted in cooperation with a university in Thailand, and using video-conferencing technology allows students in Thailand to "attend" (thus we could see a small class of giggling Thai students on a television-screen next to the professor). As a result, the class is done entirely in English and also makes use of a "digital whiteboard", basically a big computer screen upon which you can display graphics and write notes using a special marker. It all sounds pretty high-tech and cool but in fact, sadly it isn’t that great. First of all, although I would never criticize the professor’s English level (since I myself have a hard enough time understanding Japanese), he does have quite a hard time trying to express himself, and it makes an already complicated subject even harder not only for me and my Japanese classmates who probably aren’t the best English speakers either, but also for the people on the other end of the video connection in Thailand. On top of that, there seems to be quite a few problems with the digital whiteboard thing. Notes suddenly disappear due to a wrong keypress, graphics don’t display clearly and the professor spends ages scrolling up and down because of the akward interface. Oh well, I guess it’s all very new and so on, and it’ll take time for everyone to get used to it. Maybe it’ll improve given time.