Last week we had the opportunity to attend the conference CAFVIR 2012, about Quality and Accessibility in eLearning. Here you have our presentation about Mobile Learning & Commuting, and the design of Mobile Learning Scenarios (in Spanish):
Moreover, here you can find the complete paper and the rest of articles of the conference (also in Spanish): LibroActasCAFVIR2012.pdf
Enjoy!
The GSMA mEducation has published in its website a more extended version about the iUOC project, entitled “University goes portable with tablet technology”.
Here you can find and download the document:
GSMA mEducation case study university goes portable with tablet technology
Now we are testing our UOCBOX project. With the UOCbox we can connect our dropbox account with the UOC virtual campus. This is our first design: do you like it?
See the results of the first test [in catalan]
A question-answering system is being developed for Atenció a l’Estudiant. The system is intended to ease the assistants’ load of work when answering students’questions. The output has two dimensions. The first one is a list of links to web pages that describe the procedures that the student should follow in order to solve the problem. The list is displayed automatically by selecting the web pages whose procedures best match the student’s question. This shortens the time for assistants to give a proper answer. The second dimension is the answer to the same or a very similar question already made in the past.
In order to retrieve the answer to questions already posed, statistical Machine Translation Methods (STM) have been applied. These methods are those used by Google Translate. STM and answer retrieval have things in common. Both use parallel corpus (source-target sentences in STM, question-answer in answer retrieval), and both translation and answers can be retrieved by calculating the probability a string of words is related to another string. Let’s see an example. In Catalan-Spanish sentences, whenever the string Feliç Any Nou (happy New Year) appears in the source, the string Próspero Año Nuevo appears in the target. So when translating Feliç Any Nou, the Spanish phrase Próspero Año Nuevo will be the most probable translation. With the same rationale, whenever the string segon semestre (second semester) and què significa (what does it mean) appear in the questions, nearly always the phrases febrer (February) and vol dir (means) appear in the answers. These pairings are called anchor words pairs and are calculated by using the tool TonD, developed by Antoni Oliver, from the UOC’s Dept. of Arts and Humanities, to retrieve translation equivalents. So the answer retrieved is the most probable one according to the number of anchor words pairs present between the question and the answer. For instance, if the question contains the phrase segon semestre the answers containing febrer will better candidates than those which do not contain it.
The iCommunity team has been developing a series of initiatives that use Augmented Reality to enhance e-learning within the context of Cultural Heritage. As a result of that, our team was invited to give a talk and participate in a round table with experts in the application of new technologies to e-learning and tourism. The participants in the round table were:
Cèsar Carreras. UAB professor
Albert Barra. Hotel Juice. CEO
Luis Villarejo. iCommunity Project Manager
Joan Miquel Gomis. UOC Researcher at Laboratori del Nou Turisme. Enric López. CETT Postgraduate Director
Johanna Cavalcanti. UOC Consultant
The openning speech was done by Dr. Lorenzo Cantoni, from the Università della Svizzera Italiana, Lugano (Switzerland) were he focused on new trends on the application of technology to tourism and e-learning. Lorenzo Cantoni’s openning speech
After him, Luis Villarejo gave a talk on the application of Augmented Reality to support learning processes related with Landscape and Tourism. Here you have the corresponding video and slides.
Once the individual talks were finished, a round table gave the opportunity to the audience to share questions and thoughts on technology, e-learning and tourism with the experts.
Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a global program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source software projects. The UOC by means of the iCommunity group has been mentoring students inside this program for the last two years. In the 2011 edition we further developed the pre and post edition interface for the Apertium translation environment. In the slides below we summarize the initiative and its results.
For the 2012 edition, we have prepared two tasks inside the Apertiumproject so students could get the opportunity to work in this exciting initiative under the supervision of Luis Villarejo and Jordi Duran.
On 28th February we went to Yaoundée (Cameroon) in order to present the Technipedia project. As you can see here, this project consists in a platform (http://www.technipedia.com) with information about business opportunities in the economic sector of agroindustry, with information about how to create a business, and with a social network as well. The objective of the platform, and of course of the social network is to enhance awareness about entrepreneurship in Africa.
This project is coordinated by the Catalan Association of Public Universities (ACUP), and we collaborate with user studies and also coordinating the development of the platform very close to the developers from the university of Yaoundée I.
The presentation counted on the attendance of the Ministers of Education and of Small and Medium Enterprises of Cameroon, the Ambassador of Spain, the president of the ACUP who is the president of the Rovira i Virgili University, the president of PYMEC, which is the Association of Small and Medium Catalan Enterprises, and other personalities from different African Universities which have participated in the project.
Here you have the presentation of the platform, with the first steps, the platform and also some important points about the future of the project. Finally, we want to thank everybody who has worked on the project!
The UOC, the Xarxa de Punt TIC de les Terres de l’Ebre, the associació ATICTES and the IES de l’Ebre organized last February at Tortosa, a new edition of the Jornada de Programari Lliure de les Terres de l’Ebre (Conferences about Open Source). This year was about Android and applications developed for this system.
Two members of the UOC iCommunity: Raul Romero and Pepe Mora participated on 23 February 2012 at the full day academic seminar, along with Marc Saez from Ebreandroid and Tomàs Gonzalez from Tarracodroid. This conference was held at the headquarters of the UOC in Tortosa (C / Alfara Charles, 18) and discuss the possibilities and the development of Android, ending with the presentation of the first application for Android made by UOC : UOCMail.
Raul gave a short introduction on Android development: tools, environments, concepts etc … you can see in the following presentation:
Pepe Mora presented a case study: UOCMail, alias miniBústia of Virtual Campus. Here it is:
“What’s Up?”. The Application is Up and Running!
In the latest technical seminar at the UOC (conferences are held, usually the last Friday of every month), we presented the results of the launch of the pilot with students of the Degree of Multimedia.
Then, we leave the presentation’s transcription made by Arantxa Hernandez:
“I would just like to explain the launch of the “What’s Up?” application in the UOC Campus.
As you know, the goal of this project is to facilitate communication within the Campus, using a tool like Twitter, where users can type their status or mood.
The project began in 2010 and these are some of the technologies we used to make the application.
I’m very grateful to those people who worked on it at the beginning: Irene with its design, Pablo with the user tests, Jose with development. Without them, the rest of the work would not have been possible.
Finally, this year, Pepe, Gladys and Jose again, have helped me a lot.
The work of these people has been very important and vital for the success of this project.
I began to work on this project around March this year as Project Manager and my work has been to improve the HTML code for standards and accessibility. It was also important to review and coordinate the bugs through the JIRA tool and this was made possible by the participation in the previous pilot test.
The “What’s Up?” App has just been launched on Nov 30th.
The adoption of our Multimedia Degree students to this App has been spectacular. Around 90% of students have tested the application.
In just the first three hours, there were 70 messages from students and in only one week, we have had over 400 messages.
We are receiving a lot of feedback, mostly positive and, obviously some recommendations.
Generally, students have congratulated us. They have said: “It is a great idea to permit easy communication with other students”. And, this is the principal objective of this project!
One of the suggestions is to group students according to their classroom, or type of studies and subject.
Another suggestion is in line with the same ideas that we are planning to deploy which is an account of new messages in real time.
I promise that we will study all the suggestions, so the future of the tool will be: “A lot of Coffee” and improve the application!
To finish, I would like to thank, above all, the collaboration and cooperation of all the Multimedia Degree teachers. (Antoni Marín Amatller, Carlos Casado Martinez, Josep Prieto Blázquez, Roser Beneito Montagut, Laura Porta Simó, Ferran Giménez Prado, Javier Melenchón Maldonado, Laia Blasco Soplon, Quelic Berga Carreras and César Pablo Córcoles Briongos).
And always, with the assistance of Laura Castillo of “Informació a l’estudiant”, who has been interested in testing the tool and encouraging consultants and students to use it.
This short presentation is above all, a message of thanks to all of them.
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.
