What is the experience of using e-books by inmates in a prison context like? Posed with this question, the UOC and Can Brians Prison carried out a pilot study in which female inmates club book users at the prison’s library read a novel using iLiad devices.
6 e-books were lent to Can Brians’ prison library at the women’s unit, and after 3 months of a pilot study, a focus group was carried out in order to gather their thoughts about their experience. We talked about their reading habits, previous experience of using ICT, and general experience of using an e-book (advantages and disadvantages, main difficulties, and so on).
The most relevant conclusions were:
E-book and content design should be sufficiently appealing in a context where the senses are limited, in order to opt for an e-ink device instead of a paper book.
Inmates consider that learning content and other didactic content such as Wikipedia, dictionaries and pseudo-scientific journals (History, Quo…) are the most suitable content for e-books.
Using e-books and other types of ICT devices at a prison can help inmates not to be excluded from the technological world that are prevalent in our society.
You will find other main results in this presentation:
The LT Office has been invited to “Learning Without Frontiers (LWF)”; an international event which is known to be the ‘Davos’ of the global education industry. The LWF brings together international thought leaders, policy makers and innovators from the education, technology and entertainment sectors to connect and engage in a new dialogue about the future of learning.
Recognising how affordable and disruptive technologies challenge traditional approaches to industrial scale education, the LWF community has taken a globally respected position of leadership in the use of mobile, gaming, social media, open source and other digital platforms to support learning.
The discussion, however, is not about technology but how society is changing in the digital age and how our approach and platforms for learning reflect, embrace and respond to those changes.
The event will take place on January 25th and 26th in London and the UOC will share the scenario with thought leaders/opinion leaders such as Noam Chomsky or Sir Ken Robinson.
The Learning Technologies office will play a twofold role there. Firstly, we will participate in the LWF Festival where education industry leaders showcase their latest innovations. We will present the iUOC project: enhancing mobile learning at the UOC. The iUOC allows the developing of native applications to connect with our virtual campus. The very first outcome of the project is the Campus for iPAd app, which has been developed collaboratively with Orange. Secondly, we will be part of a panel discussion with education industry experts on how mobiles can support education in schools, colleges and universities.
Stay tuned for our feedback whilst in the Learning Without Frontiers event.
Today the iCommunity team presents a joint educational experience together with the Laboratori del Nou Turisme, on the use of Augmented Reality (AR) for landscape building. The experience is allowing forty Cultural Heritage’s students to collaboratively build landscape all around Catalunya using Augmented Reality elements. Students will use Hoppala and AR browsers like Layar, Wikitude or Junaio to build landscape units that can be viewed through mobile devices like smartphones or tablets (which Orange has kindly provided for this experience).
Once the project will be finished, data will be publicly available through Layar augmented reality browser. Check out these slides to get a general idea of the project.
This experience has been possible due to the Open Innovation Office. Stay tuned for more news on this exciting initiative!
The UOC Virtual Campus is already accessible from mobile devices. This new achievement was presented last October to the Spanish and Catalan media and it entails a great breakthrough for our users. Indeed, students, professors and other members from UOC can now log into the campus homepage via any mobile device. The mobile version provides access to the homepage, the virtual classrooms and other private areas of the main campus, facilitating users to check their mail, activity in their classrooms, calendar, community forums and many other widgets without a computer but just their mobiles -you would find more information here.
What are you waiting for? Be mobile and get connected to the mobile UOC Campus.
MiniBustia is an android Client that connects to your UOC’s mailbox. Its essential operations allow users to read, write, and answer messages in an Android mobile, anywhere, anyplace and at anytime.
While developing this app, we faced different problems such as screen size, different models and versions of the Operating System or speed limitations (3G or HPDA form connection is much slower than a Net connection). The way we overcame these restrictions when modeling were:
At the implementation, a mix strategy was used. This was a native source Android for making a list of folders -using Web Service (SOAP)- and direct web call for message reading.
Also, several options of Android as Menu, use the bottons were also employed.
When finishing this project, your mobile device will have the same capacity as that of the UOC Mailbox; a great application for a product so small!
The MinBustia application will be deployed as BETA at the begining of 2012.
From the 19th to 23rd October, we travelled once again to Yaoundé to continue collaborating on the Technipedia project. You will find more information about this project at the post titled ‘Technipedia project: trip to Cameroon’.
This week was set up in order to work closer with the Yaoundé team on the final wireframes, platform implementation and strategic decisions regarding the following steps of the project. Usability tests on wireframes were also carried out with 5 final users.
The working week turned out well in that it produced valuable and useful outcomes that have allowed the different project partners to work at developing the first beta version of the Technipedia platform within the following months.
The outcomes of that week were:
Final agreement on the wireframes
Initial local installation of the platform
Identification of extensions to cover all the functionalities
“Mobile connectivity provides an opportunity to offer new ways of teaching and learning that ultimately will improve performance and results whilst at the same time open up new markets formobile operators across the world. Mobile will increase access to up-to-date materials, will enable collaboration and strengthen learner engagement. [...]“
In collaboration with Orange has been published as a case study in a GSMA’s report on education Mobile (GSMA are the organizers of Mobile World Congress, the most important internationally event of mobile)
Our project, listed as one of three case studies report that has been done about Spain. This is an important recognition for the institution.
In collaboration with the company Orange, the UOC has developed an iPad application that users can download directly from their device for connecting to the UOC’s Virtual Campus in an optimum manner.
Here you have the video of our speech at the EUNIS conference, about mobile learning in the iUOC project.
What’s Up? is a microblogging application developed by the iCommunity team of the Office of Learning Tecnologies (lt.uoc.edu) from UOC.
This tool works within the UOC virtual campus and aims to promote communication among members of the UOC community.
What’s Up? can also be synchronized with your personal Twitter account so that you don´t need any longer to maintain your status in more than one social network.
You can see the video of the tool, presented by Arantxa Hernández, here:
