Education: Liberty, e-quality, humanity

This city of 100,000 people in the southernmost Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul is named after the leader of the 1835-1845 Revoluçao Farroupilha (Ragged Revolution), which under the slogan "Liberty, Equality, Humanity" resulted in the independence of the state from the Brazilian empire. At an international conference here today, peaceful revolutionaries are furthering similar ideals. The Jul. 26-31 9th World Conference on Computers in Education (WCCE), titled "Education and Technology for a Better World", has brought together 650 education experts and information and communication technology (ICT) specialists from 44 countries in the city of Bento Gonçalves. Nearly 500 participants are from different parts of Brazil, and the others come from all six continents. Organised by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP), the WCCE is supported by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), the Rede de Informacao Tecnologica Latino-Americana (RITLA), the Brazilian ministries of science and technology and of education, the education secretariat of the state government of Rio Grande do Sul, and a number of Brazilian universities and companies. The conference "is about putting computing and education people together, which strikes a spark" of creativity, said Franco Simini, a professor of biomedical engineering at the Universidad de la República in Uruguay.