The Sloan-C International Symposium on Emerging Technology Applications for Online Learning took place on 17, 18 and 19 June in San Francisco, California. It is one of the leading events in the USA bringing together professionals to exchange innovative e-learning practices and knowledge.

This year’s Symposium was a great success in terms of the number of people taking part, breaking new records. Many of the lectures and workshops focused on the use that a great number of educational institutions, and higher education institutions in particular, are making of the most successful social tools, and reflected on the ways to apply them to learning. Other aspects, such as increasing ubiquity, greater possibilities for collaboration using the new tools, open content and the Web 3.0 as the next big thing, also played an important part in many of the presentations.

The Office of Learning Technologies’ Joy of Learning team attended so as to be able to present a poster on the Enjoy Guidelines, which were shared and discussed with different innovation and research groups from universities from around the world. Thanks to all of you for your interesting contributions to our work!

The Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) continuously gains international recognition. This Saturday, the UOC was awarded for its leadership in technology education with the “Center of Excellence” award by the New Media Consortium (NMC), an international consortium of universities, and museums dedicated to the exploration and use of new media and technology. It is the first time a European institution recieves a Center of Excellence Award.

Both, Llorenç Valverde, Vice Rector for Technology and Eva de Lera, an Educational Technology researcher from the Office of Leraning Technologies, collected the award at a ceremony held at the NMC Summer Conference in Monterey (United States). During the ceremony, the Rector of the UOC, Imma Tubella, also conveyed his gratitude to the NMC through the following video:

This award is considered an important recognition to the latest accomplishments of the university in creating innovative technologies. An example of it, is the project MyUOC, the new virtual campus of the university, which allows both teachers and students to build a virtual environment according to their needs. MyUOC also offers the possibility to customize the learning experience through the homepage of the virtual campus. In addition, ts open source nature allows to integrate modules from other learning platforms, providing flexibility and interoperability.

With this award, the NMC also valued the UOC leadership to promote collective collaboration for the development of open source and innovative educational technology. A sample of it was the Open EdTech 2008 meeting held in Barcelona last November, hosted and organised by UOC, whwre over thirty international experts in education and educational technology were gathered to discuss the challenges of education in the XXI century.

More information

UOC’s new learning environment was presented at MIT on March 9th, 2009 (view MyUOC ppt).

When we decided to organize Open EdTech 2008, we wanted to ensure that this was an engaging, motivating and “joyfull” user experience. Please visit Open EdTech 2008 for more information about the meeting, the questions discussed, and the participants that made this enriching experience possible.

Open EdTech 2008 ended successfully on Tuesday November 11th at midnight, after a typical Catalan dinner in the Old City of Barcelona. Plans for Open EdTech 2009 are on their way.

More photos on: Open EdTech on Flickr

You can read about Open EdTech in the following posts:

• Ismael Peña’s ICTlogy
• Mark Bullen’s blog
• Steve Wheeler’s blog
• Tom Caswell’s blog

We are looking forward to Open EdTech 2009, location to be announced.

The 26th of September last, I presented “Campus 5.0: the experience of redesigning the UOC Virtual Campus” in the EuroIA 2008. EuroIA is a congress on Information Architecture. This year, it took place in Amsterdam, and it was, as the organization defines it, two incredible days [26th and 27th] of presentations, panels, and networking with information architects from across Europe and around the world.

The presentation of Campus 5.0 was focused on the navigation thought up for the new campus and the Home page, which will shortly be launched during this semester. In this context I talked about the “Enjoy” project as a reference point of the work carried out.

It was great meeting Jutta in person at this year IMS 2008 conference in Austin, TX.

At UOC, we share the vision that Jutta so clearly exposed during her IMS 2008 presentation (ppt). We believe that disabilities or special capabilities are context or individual dependant, for everyone! And that these circumstances need to be accounted for in the design and development process.

UOC’s efforts toward designing for engagement and for the individual (see this Joy of Learning website and also MyWay project - winner of Best Mobile Learning Solution), demonstrate our desire to transform the way we have been tackling education, specifically online education, and believe that innovations in learning and technology can help us achieve just that: a learning environment that is optimized for each learner, is inclusive and transformable.

We look forward to collaborating with Jutta and her team on the The Fluid Project, and other projects from the Adaptive Technology Resource Center led by Jutta Treviranus.

It was great having an opportunity to speak to Martha Cleveland-Innes from Athabasca University.

UOC interviewed Martha during her visit. Here’s the link to the interview.