Welcome to the 14th International Conference on Computers in Education (ICCE) hosted by Beijing Normal University (BNU) and supported by the Ministry of Education (MOE) and Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence (CAAI). The series of conferences started in Taiwan in 1989. The three first editions of ICCE occurred there and then the conference moved across many countries in the Asia-Pacific region: China, Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Australia. The ICCE series is organized by the Asia-Pacific Society for Computers in Education (APSCE). The ICCE is an international event, with strong participation from researchers from Asia and Oceania. Since the beginning, there has also been strong involvement from researchers in Europe and North-America.

These proceedings include the 45 full papers and 53 short papers that have been selected by an international board of scholars listed hereafter. All papers have been reviewed by three or at least two reviewers and double-checked by the Co-chairs of the programme committee. Altogether 254 papers were submitted, which represents a rate of acceptance of 18% if considering only long papers or 38% if including short papers. The content of this volume hence results from a severe selection process. In addition, 22 posters will be presented at the event.

A major theme of this conference is the use of computers for supporting collaborative learning. This is not surprising since computer-supported collaborative learning has become both a widespread educational practice and a main domain of research. Moreover, collaborative learning has deep roots in Asian educational traditions. Given the large number of researchers within this field, its scope has become very broad. Under this umbrella, one finds a variety of more specific topics such as: interaction analysis, collaboration scripts (e.g. the Jigsaw script), communities of practice, socio-cognitive conflict resolution, cognitive apprenticeship, various tools for argumentation, on-line discussion or collaborative drawing tools (whiteboards), collaborative writing and the role of facilitators.

Most research work on collaborative learning focuses on interactions rather than on the contents of environments, which had been the focus in the previous decades of learning technology research. However, there is no reason to focus on one aspect to the detriment of the other. Hence, we are quite pleased that the selected papers also cover multiple issues related to the storage, representation and retrieval of knowledge: ontologies for learning environments and the semantic web, knowledge bases and data mining, meta-data and content management systems, and so forth. These proceedings also reveal a growing interest for non-verbal educational material, namely pictures and video materials, which are already central to new popular web-based applications.

Interestingly, these proceeding include contributions that bridge both research tracks, the one focusing on interactions and the other on contents: the pedagogical use of digital portfolios, both for promoting individual reflections and for scaffolding group interactions. Another specificity of these proceedings, maybe due to regional policies, is the salience of language learning within the range of educational contents covered by learning technologies.

Among the other research trends that appear in the set of contributions, we find the educational use of mobile technologies and the design of educational games. The use of mobile devices and games opens new ways to think about learning technologies, namely the fact that tools that do not a priori appear as learning tools have perhaps more chances to enter into schools. There are nonetheless a limited number of papers on these issues since new conferences emerged in our community, which are devoted to these two subsets of learning technologies.

Finally, let us stress the truly interdisciplinary character of this volume. It contains contributions from the field of computer science, psychology and educational sciences, three fields that are sometimes bound together under the label of 'learning sciences'. The very positive aspect is that computational, pedagogical, cognitive or social factors are not only treated by different papers, but, in many cases, tackled within the same paper.

It is our great pleasure to have gathered these rich contributions within this volume. We hope all readers will share our enthusiasm for this exceptional event.

Program Committee Co-Chairs, Riichiro Mizoguchi, Osaka University, Japan; Pierre Dillenbourg, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, Switzerland; Zhiting Zhu, East China Normal University, China