7th VOA3R Meeting & LINQ Conference

This whole week, several IE members (Miguel Angel, David Martin, Salvador, Jaako and Alberto) flew to Rome to attend the 7th VOA3R project meeting and the LINQ 2013 Conference taking place in the FAO premises in this beautiful city.

Panoramic view of one of the VOA3R meeting sessions

Another panorama of the meeting sessions

The meeting was specially focused on the portal update, demonstrating the improvements and new functionalities implemented during the last period, as well as in examining the progress of the content integration and population task.It is relevant to mention the VOA3R – Semagrow Stakeholder joint Meeting that was held during the second day of the meeting.

VOA3R – Semagrow Stakeholder joint Meeting during the second day of the meeting.

As for the LinQ conference, it was aimed at addressing Innovations and Quality in Lifelong Learning, Education and Training: potential points of access to this field include new learning methods and design, Technology-Enhanced Learning, quality standards and certification, human resources development, competences and skills, digital resources, learning materials, and online collaboration and communities. Several projects in which our team is involved were presented (e.g. Organic.Lingua and VOA3R) as well as several papers coauthored by members of the team.

Carlos M. Lorenzo PhD dissertation

Today, several IE members attended to the Ph.D dissertation of Carlos M. Lorenzo, including Giannis Stoitsis, Miguel Angel Sicilia and other junior members of the team. Carlos has been working during the last 2 years under the supervision of Salvador and Miguel Angel on his research called USING MMOL PLATFORMS FOR COLLABORATIVE EDUCATIONAL TASKS. This research, focused on discussing educational virtual worlds capabilities to train group’s and personal’s social skills in a media-rich, collaborative and immersive environment, is a remarkable step towards exploring new contexts for communication-enhanced learning. The main theoretical assumptions are that participation, concerns, co-participants, contexts and structures of practices have significant influence on couplings between learners’ skills improvement and the use of educational virtual worlds or MMOL platforms. In order to prove these assumptions, Carlos presented three different experimental studies of collaborative educational tasks in an MMOL setting.

From left to right: Manuel Palomo (UCA), Giannis Stoitsis (UAH&AK), PhD candidate Carlos M. Lorenzo, Carlos R. Solano (UAH), German Ruiperez (UNED), Ricardo Colomo (UC3M) and supervisor Miguel A. Sicilia

Carlos, who received the highest possible mark “Cum Laude” for his quality research, is the third PhD student to complete his doctorate studies in the Computer Science Department “Mention of Excellence” program. Given that the PhD has also the  international mention, professors from Carlos III University, UNED, University of Cadiz, and internationally recognized researchers in the area such as Giannis Stoitsis from AgroKnow, Greece, formed the board of assessors for the dissertation, which took place in the 3M room of the Rectorate building in downtown Alcala.

 

Organic.Lingua Pilot & Usability trials in Birmingham

Organic.Lingua pilot trials have just started! This kind of events are a great opportunity to extract valuable information about the renewed Organic.Edunet portal from the usability point of view and we are doing our best to do so. That’s why IE researcher, David Martín-Moncunill was in Birmingham last week, to attend and drive the pilot trials organized by the Birmingham City University.

Arriving to Birmingham City University from the train station.

The event started with a welcome speech and introduction to the portal by Katharine Fuller, whom was hosting the event. Then all participants filled up a profile questionnaire. The information in these questionnaires was useful to select most suitable participants for each kind of trial; while David and Katherine were deciding, the participants enjoyed a really nice coffee (and English tea) break.

Katharine, introducing Organic.Lingua portal & project.

According to the questionnaires, participants were asked to join thinking aloud or interview sessions. David conducted the thinking aloud sessions and Katharine did the same with the interviews.

Screen capture: starting a thinking aloud session (you can see half of David face there!)

After all -usability and interview- sessions were finished 7 users were asked to participate in a focus group to collect more qualitative information about these 3 topics:

1)  General aspects of the portal.

2) Navigational Interface.

3) Understanding “Organic-Lingua” languages.

We collected lots of valuable information which will be really useful to guide the future development of the portal. Thanks to BCU for hosting!

Successful 2nd Organic.Lingua review in Luxembourg

Yesterday we had the review at the EU commission premises in Luxemburg. It was a good Review Meeting for the project, and we would like to thank not only the WP representatives but also the partners that worked hard to deliver on time, even if they did not participate to the actual meeting.

According to the initial feedback from the reviewers and PO we had a good progress during the second year of the project. We sincerely feel that we managed to communicate the strong points of our approach, and contribute also into having a better understanding among us on the value of this project.

We received constructive and helpful comments from the reviewers. We need to do our best for these last 10 months to have the expected final results. I would like to thank you all again for the contributions and efforts so far in the project and hope that this last phase will be the most productive and exciting for all.

IE members Leonardo, Salvador and Giannis were in Luxembourg for the meeting and pre-meeting sessions. In the photos above, different moments of the pre-review meeting.

LAK 2013 Conference

Last week, IE member Enayat Rajabi, attended the LAK 2013 conference and the ODS workshop in Leuven, Belgium. There was also a common meeting between GLOBE and ARIADNE members on 8th April (in the afternoon) that he participated as well. In this meeting, attendances shared their ideas about some issues that large educational repositories are faced. They discussed the topics in several groups and finalized them in a conclusion session.

Enayat also presented a paper in Lacro 2013 workshop held in the LAK conference. The paper reported on a investigation about keywords space of the GLOBE materials.

Enayat during his presentation at LAK2013

There was another meeting which discussed the ODS(Open Discovery Space) challenges and attendances shared their ideas about many technical and non-technical issues about this project. INTRASOFT led the meeting and posed several issues about statistical data over the ODS. Enayat was the UAH representative in ARIADNE General Assembly which held on 9th of April in the afternoon. ARIADNE General Assembly is a private meeting restricted to the ARIADNE members and considers the new status of current projects, opportunities and general ideas.

Night view of Leuven

The city of Leuven is a fabulous Flemish city, and it’s just a jump from Brussels (25km). Leuven (Louvain in French) is the chief town of the province of Vlaams-Brabant. It’s an ancient capital – the home of the Dukes of Brabant since 1200 – and in medieval times an important cloth trading centre. Today it boasts one of Belgium’s most ornate town halls and is Flanders’ oldest university town.

Open Discovery Space meeting in Brussels

IE members Enayat Rajabi and Salvador Sanchez attended the ODS consortium meeting in Brussels last 20th and 21st of March. The meetings took place in the center of the city and were lead by the project coordinator partner INTRASOFT. The participation of our group was focused on work packages 7, 8 and 9 but we also participated in discussions related to other parts of the project.

Salvador and Enayat at “la Grand Place” of Brussels

The group presented the UAH part in the portal development, such as the search engine and the summary page, on Thursday during the joint cluster meeting (see picture below these lines), architectural issues related to the portal, and the Strategic Planning session in which we prepared our part of the overall WP7 plan for the next months.

ODS Portal presentation at the joint cluster meeting

Organic.Lingua 5th project meeting in Alcala

Wednesday to Friday this week the Organic.Lingua consortium representatives gathered in Alcala de Henares for the 5th project meeting. This is an important meeting as the decisions that we will take are essential to plan the forthcoming pilot tests in England and France, as well as all the preparations for the next review meeting.

IE members Miguel Angel, Giannis, David Baños, David Martin, Leonardo and Salvador attend the sessions as the Faculty of Law in the University of Alcala, in a building that was originally a Jesuit college built at the end of the seventeenth century. Below some pictures taken during these 3 fruitful days of  intensive work.

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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IE members in MTSR 2012

Last week, IE members Salvador and Miguel Angel participated in MTSR 2012 in several ways: presenting papers, chairing sessions and overall networking with collegaues in other universities and institutions working in similar topics. This year, this important event for researchers in the area of metadata and semantics was held in Cadiz, a city in southwestern Spain. Below, some images taken during these days.

Taken from http://www.flickr.com/people/mtsr2012/

Herbal.Mednet kick-off meeting in Alcala

Today and tomorrow the kick-off meeting of the Leonardo DaVinci Transfer of innovation project is taking place in Alcala. This project will transfer training content that has been tested in Spain and Romania into Italy and Greece, as well as in new geographical region users’ group in Spain.

During the next 2 years, Herbal.Mednet participants will select and adapt existing training contents in organic farming of herbal, medicinal and aromatic plants that is publicly available worldwide to the countries of the participating user groups. At the same time, the project will transfer the innovative training techniques that have been developed for the agricultural advisors and trainers in organic Agriculture through previous initiatives like Organic.Mednet and Organic.Balkanet into agricultural advisors in a new thematic area: organic farming in herbal, medicinal and aromatic plants. In the picture above these lines, representatives of all partner institutions and other external experts pose in the rectorate building of the University of Alcala, where the sessions of the meeting are taking place.

IE member Salvador is representing UAH in the project, in which we are leading WP3 dealing with the design and deployment of the e-learning platform where the courses will be delivered.