Information Engineering Research Unit blog

This morning, the first TELSpain meeting took place in Madrid. TELSpain is an initiative to dynamize the “technology enhanced learning” (e-learning) R&D sector in Spain. I (Miguel-Angel) have been serving as Management Committee member of the group since its inception. Accidentaly, this has led me to be a (more or less) regular blogger at the blog inside the TELSpain portal. Posts are on e-learning topics in general, and in Spanish as the audience is local.

If you want to read some posts about our views on e-learning, this is a great opportunity

IE member Salvador Sanchez has been invited to be part of the review board of a PhD dissertation supervised by Francisco Garcia Peñalvo, leader of the GRIAL research group at University of Salamanca. The PhD thesis by Hector Barbosa, a Mexican lecturer working in GRIAL’s research projects, presented Adasat, an automated generator of QTI-compliant tests. This tool generates personalized tests depending on the learner’s learning styles and preferences.

It’s veeeery cold in Salamanca these days (during the night, it cools off to -5ºC !) but the warmth welcome by our Salamanca friends, the beautiful university city of Salamanca and the nice research work finished helps to warm up. Below, a shot taken from Francisco’s desk. Everybody wish to had this view from their desks!

Salamanca seen from Fan Peñalvo's desk

Two weeks ago, IE member Leonardo Lezcano attended a two-day meeting in Lund where the Centre for eHealth in Sweden (CeHis) and The National Board of Health and Welfare (Socialstyrelsen) presented their archetypes approach to the rest of teams involved in implementing EHR systems. This meeting was a follow up to the CEN/ISO EN13606 Workshop held in Madrid in June, 2010.

The first day focused on the foundation for the information structure from a clinical perspective while the second day focused “technical” aspects of creating and handling archetypes based on the clinical perspective.

It was a great opportunity to meet Thomas Beale, CTO of Ocean Informatics UK and one of the founders of the openEHR Foundation, and Rong Chen, project leader of the openEHR Java Reference Implementation Project.

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This week, IE member Salvador Sanchez-Alonso is in Adana (Turkey) coordinating the first (of the three planned) pilot training courses of agricultural professionals, advisors and trainers. The course runs from the 8th to the 12th of November 2010, and is part of the activities of the Organic.Mednet project.

Different moments of the course activities

Apart from the trainers -members of almost all parner intitutions- the people participating in this training are advisors operating in the field of organic agriculture, teachers at vocational schools and trainers of farmers. The event is being a success as we have 13 agricultural professionals from the area of the Çukurova area. Later on, we will replicate the course in Spain and Greece.

From left to right Salvador, Zeynel (Çukurova University), Kostas (DIO), Bas and Charlie (IFSAT) and Xenia (Technical University of Crete)

The training course meetings are hosted by the Turkish partner of Organic.Mednet, Çukurova University, in the huge campus that this university has in the outskirts of the city of Adana. The weather is so nice that we (the trainers of the course) usually have a coffee after lunch in one of the areas outside the cafeterias, as in the picture above these lines, taken this afternoon in the one that faces the Seyhan reservoir.