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:
The UOC’s Innovation Programme and Office of Learning Technologies attended the event as guests of GSMA Mobile Education on behalf of the University and Orange.
The Learning Without Frontieres festival included the GSMA Mobile Education dome, where different institutions and companies could set up stands about mobile education projects. Alongside Orange and the UOC, the other companies with stands were Vodafone India, Castalia (m-learning in Japan, presenting a project in areas affected by the tsunami), Telefónica Learning Services, KDDI (robots for mobile learning) and Qualcomm (mobile education and augmented reality).
Marta Enrech, Director of the UOC’s Innovation Programme, before the Orange-UOC stand is set up
All the institutions and companies with a stand in the GSMA Mobile Education area gave presentations on their projects over the two days of the event. You can find here a brief summary of the iUOC project presentation: http://icommunity.blogs.uoc.edu/ipad-campus Likewise, the Office of Learning Technologies also took part in one of the panels of experts on mobile education organised in the GSMA Mobile Education area.
Networking after the iUOC presentation (Eva Patrícia Gil, Community Initiatives Director – Learning Technologies Office)
Josep Rivera, from the Office of Learning Technologies, takes part in the GSMA Mobile Education Panel
The conference is seen as the most important for technology and education, and the quality of speakers (Noam Chomsky and Ken Robinson, among others) attracts a great number of participants. The GSMA Mobile Education area is very popular. This gave us the chance to meet (as well as the companies and institutions mentioned above) people from Spanish and international universities and academic institutions interested in implementing mobile learning, and other operators embarking on projects in this field – of these, we would highlight Softbank, a Japanese operator working on m-learning projects with distance universities in its area of influence.
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:
You will find other main results in this presentation:
