IERU day at UAH

Last Tuesday the whole IE staff, consisting of 20~ members that include professors, developers and students, organized a morning presentation session where each member briefly described the current state of the research projects he/she is involved in. As it can be appreciated in the IERU’s wiki, the group coordinates three European projects (i.e., ICT PSP VOA3R, ICT PSP Organic.Lingua and FP7-INFRASTRUCTURES agINFRA) while it is a member of the consortium of other projects with heterogeneous scope. That is the case of the European project Open Discovery Space and the national projects HEDECAMA, MAVSEL and SLROUTE.

The end of the session led to a cocktail in order to celebrate Christmas as well as the research success of the group, in spite of the difficult situation that the academic world is going through. Below, some pictures of the event…

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Autumn School in Mesta

Salvador just outside the city fortress

Last week, IE member Salvador Sanchez-Alonso was in Chios island attending to the Joint School on IT-Enhanced Organic & Sustainable Education for Teachers. This training course is approved by the European Commission and supported by four European projects: CerOrganic, Organic.Mednet, Organic.Balkanet and ISLE. The training was addressed to all teachers, trainers and professionals interested in the field of Environmental & Ecological Education, aiming to provide a better understanding of the current advances related to Organic Farming, Sustainable Education, Blended Learning and Modern ICT tools. It was collocated with the Green Ideas workshop, an event  aimed at bringing together people and institutions that are interested into agricultural, biodiversity and rural education, so that collaboration opportunities may be explored and exploited.

IE role in the Joint school was twofold: to promote and disseminate Organic.Balkanet results to the attendees of the courses on one hand, and to teach on metadata annotation practices to agricultural experts on the other.

Both events (Green ideas and Joint school) took place in the medieval village of Mesta, heart of the “masticohoria” or mastic villages, a region of the island renowned for their cultivation of mastic trees. This village is a fortress-like complex of narrow streets, a laberinth of houses and arches. Mesta is unique -if we compare it to other medieval villages in the island- because it is the most well-preserved.

A panorama of Mesta from a nearby olive tree field

 

7th JTEL Summer School

This week, IE member Salvador Sanchez-Alonso attends the 7th JTEL Summer School that takes place from today May 30th to Friday June 3rd, in Chania, Crete, Greece. The summer school aims to encourage participants to adopt a critical stance in thinking about the role of technologies in providing opportunities for learners and the potential of these opportunities in terms of learning. This is an excellent opportunity to be inmersed in a learning environment where participants get opportunities to develop their research skills; increase their knowledge base; collaborate with others in their own and complementary research areas; engage in debate; have access to experts in the field; and discuss their own work.

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Salvador is representing the IE research unit by giving the talk “Ratings, tags, bookmarks and other species: some examples of quantitative research on information filtering in TEL”, which is more or less a guided tour on what we achieved in the last 4 years, our methods and results, as well as a definition of open research opportunities for PhD students. It is important to note that in the recent past, our group has developed a productive research line on the use of these data to identify underlying knowledge such as social relations, user preferences or hints on the quality of the resources to create applications for recommendation, filtering an item or learner clustering, to name just a few. Successes and pitfalls of this research will be illustrated in this talk from our past experiences point of view. Some pictures of the venue, the city of Chania and the people attending the event are displayed as a slide show above these lines.

 

MTSR 2010 Conference in Alcala

From yesterday, and during 3 days, Alcala de Henares is hosting the 4th Metadata and semantics research conference, MTSR 2010. This conference aims at becoming the main event for researchers in the area of metadata and semantics with an inter-disciplinary focus.

 

Partial view of the room where Ferdinando Villa gave his keynote talk

 

This years’ edition includes interesting keynote talks by international experts such as Christian M. Stracke, an expert and senior consultant with international reputation and numerous references within his main working fields policies and quality for learning, quality management, E-Learning, competence modelling and standardization; Dave Roberts, from the National History Museum, London, well known after his contribution to the EDIT project (in particular his work on Scratchpads); Ferdinando Villa, a renowned researcher on high-performance computer simulation, ecological modeling, and artificial intelligence applied to environmental data and model integration; and Brigitte Joerg, an elected CERIF taskgroup leader at euroCRIS -a non-profit organization dedicated to the development of Research Information Systems and their interoperability- and member of the euroCRIS Board.

The conference can be followed in Twitter searching for the tag #mtsr2010 and also through the Facebook MTSR (MeTadata and Semantics Research conference) open group.

 

CCITA 2010 on TV

Yesterday, a documentary on CCITA2010, the joint ibeo-american conference on learning technologies, was broadcasted on TVE internacional, an internationally-broadcast Spanish language channel run by Spain’s national broadcaster, TVE. CCITA 2010 is the second edition of a conference on learning objects and technologies that takes place at the same time in both sides of the Atlantic. This year the conferences will be hosted by the University of Yucatan (Mexico) and the University of Cadiz (Spain).

[Access the full video here]

In the documentary, members of the organizing committe in Spain (IE member Salvador Sanchez) and Mexico (Manuel Prieto from University of Castilla la Mancha) talk about the aims of the conference and the current state of the art in elearning.

 

Evaluating learning objects quality in MMOL environments

In the framework of a new pHd on the impact of Massively Multiuser Online Learning environments (MMOL) in virtual courses, IE member Salvador Sanchez participates in a pioneering experience on the evaluation of learning objects quality in one of these environments.

Agenda of the session

Run by the pHd candidate Carlos M. Lorenzo, the session uses the collaborative LORI approach, where a group of users contribute their individual evaluations on a learning object and try to reach a consensus after hearing everyone else’s opinion. A first step focuses on each individual evaluations, where each participant briefly presents his / her validation. Later, points where major disagreement exist are studied with the help of a moderator who tries to guide participants to reach an agreement (but not forcing them to change their initial perceptions if they don’t want to).

Getting familiar with others' preliminary evaluations

During the negotiation phase, a shared Google docs spreadsheet is used by the moderator to integrate the validations and to modify them according to the changes suggested after the discussions run.

Integrating individual evaluations in a google spreadsheet in the MMOL environment

Preliminary results in other topics of our master degree will be published soon, as we think these technologies really look promising on bringing motivation to online courses compared to traditional LMSs.

 

Organic.Edunet on TV!

Last month, as part of the dissemination activities of our project Organic.Edunet, greek television interviewd Sofokles Sotiriou and Nikos Manouselis and showed our portal to the world!

I know this probably is Greek to you (it is to me too), but it is a nice video to see anyway.

 

MTSR 2009

Last week, IE members Miguel-Ángel Sicila and Ramiro Cano were attending the MTSR 2009 conference, held in Milan, in the University of Milano-Bicocca. This bianual conference aims at bringing together researchers and practitioners who share a common interest in metadata, its representation, its semantics and its diverse applications to Information Systems.

Apart from the conference, there was a little time for entertainment, including the social dinner which took place at the wonderful location of Grand Hotel Villa Torretta.

From left to right: Ramiro Cano, Miguel-Ángel Sicilia, Cristian Cechinel and Juan Manuel Dodero

 

SSFW09

Last week, IE member Leonardo Lezcano attended the SSFW09 workshop, held in Milan, where he presented an approach titled “Integrating Disease And Diagnosis Semantics In Clinical Archetypes”. This workshop was a follow up to the first workshop on Signs, Symptoms and Findings: Towards an Ontology for Clinical Phenotypes held in Dallas in 2008. The aim of both meetings was to achieve a better understanding of the pathogenesis of human disease in order to develop effective diagnostic, therapeutic and prevention strategies. This Milan edition was organized by the DISCo Bioinformatics Group at the University of Milano-Bicocca.
The workshop audience was pleased to watch the presentation of Nicola Guarino, one of the key names in the ontologies domain, as well as the one of Barry Smith, perhaps the most vociferous advocate of the philosophical approach to the study of ontologies in informatics.

SSFW09 participants

From left to right: Leonardo Lezcano, Gianluca Colombo, Daniele Merico

 

Talking about openness at Miraflores

Last wednesday, Miguel-Angel gave a talk on the concept of openness at Colegio Mayor Miraflores, in Zaragoza, as part of the activities of the “New Technologies” programme the College organizes every year. The slides (in Spanish) have been posted at Manu Benito’s blog:

http://www.memeteka.net/2008/11/profundizando-en-qu-es-abierto.html

In the picture below, left to right Fernando Martín (Microsoft), Jesús Romo (Basque Country Univ.), Miguel-Angel and Oscar González (the chair of the session and organizer of the event). Jesús spoke about the history and pitfalls of Creative Commons licenses, and Fernando about open source and proprietary software (a curious relation :-/).