I came back from Germany and now have to teach two course this quarter — Multimedia Systems and Applications and Entrepreneurship. There is no good text book for Multimedia. The book by Nahrstedt and Steinmetz is OK and I am going to use it more as a general reference than the text. I feel that the text books play a very important role in establishing a field and Multimedia does need a good text. However, for multimedia it should not be a book — it should practice what it presents and that could not be done properly using just the paper.
This issue was discussed in a workshop in Augsburg. It was interesting to see how strongly people felt that there was a need for such a book — that included Klara Nahrstedt who was present and has been vocal in saying that such a book is needed. If I were 10 years younger, I would have considered working on such a project. But in my current situation I don’t have time for this project — but consider it a great project for a multimedia researcher who has crossed the tenure hurdle.
The conference and the workshops were very good — and the weather made sure that people could not do anything else so the attendence in sessions was good. Next year’s conference is in Vancouver and the one in 2009 is in Beijing.
If I were a your student, I would have prefered to attend a seminar with more practical sessions instead of theory on Multimedia.