Category: General

Del 23 al 26 de junio tuvo lugar en la Universidad de Santiago de Compostela la Conferencia Internacional de EUNIS 2009 con el subtítulo para esta edición de “IT: Key of the European Space for Knowledge”. EUNIS (“European University Information Systems”). En la web de la Conferencia podéis encontrar el programa y acceder a las distintas ponencias. Tuve el privilegio de moderar la sesión “New technologies for education”. Y mayor fue mi alegría cuando las tres ponencias eran españolas y de una gran calidad. Voy a extraer un párrafo de cada una de ellas y os animo a que las leáis completas y, en caso de que estéis interesados, contactéis con los autores, ya que el papel no refleja el excelente trabajo que se está haciendo. Hay ideas muy interesantes y novedosas. Mi enhorabuena a las tres Universidades: Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Universidad de Sevilla y Universidad de Málaga.

Mycampus, an online learning environment that provides choices of tools and services to all. Llorenç Valverde, Magí Almirall, Francesc Santanach, Xavi Aracil y Eva Loste. Universitat Oberta de Catalunya.
“MyUOC is the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) new online learning environment that was designed to allow users (students, faculty, and staff) to build their own learning environment according to their needs. This innovative conceptualization of LMS was embraced in order to provide customized learning platforms increasingly competent to any user. MyUOC is innovative in that it is a learning platform which is interoperable with other learning platforms. MyUOC can be compatible with any LMS, using Open Knowledge Initiative specifications (OKI). Its open source nature and technology allows it to take any of MyUOC’s tools and services out to other learning environments, such as Moodle or SAKAI, and vice versa. In fact, if any LMS adopted this technology it would be able to integrate tools and services from other platforms and, in turn, share their own LMS tools with others.”

University of Seville, Building Tomorrow’s Education. Carlos León de Mora, Juan Camarillo Casado, Ana Conde Gómez y Victoria Fernández. Universidad de Sevilla.
“To date, the updating of the virtual learning platform is continuous, integrating into it tools that foster collaboration in the teaching-learning processes: Web-based tools that encourage and facilitate social activities, collaboration, guided practice and evaluation. They have increased the possibilities of interaction between users and the user attention level in online environments through the use of voice in the contents of the course.
The integration of the Web 2.0 paradigm in this scenario is nowadays a reality. The University of Seville’s virtual learning platform includes blogging, podcasting, RSS syndication, social networks and other last generation services and tools, to encourage collaboration among the different members of the university community.
Looking ahead, the University is committed to promote the students social networking and mobility through the development of new projects such as the identity federation among universities, the implementation of Learning Objects repositories and the introduction of Knowledge Management Systems, among others.”

Identity Based Clusters of Applications for Collaboration and eLearning. José A. Accino, Manuel Cebrián y Victoriano Giralt. Universidad de Málaga.
“User centric learning, if it is to be really innovative, should be oriented towards a more holistic view of the user experience and, to this respect, daily network use is becoming more and more relevant. Thus, next generation applications, much more so learning environments, should interoperate inside the new framework where the real platform is the network and that is centered around the user.
Collaborative – groupware type – applications are not enough for achieving the above objectives, they must be made to collaborate among themselves, in the way they show and share their resources, starting with the user identity. Adapting learning environments development to this new context requires a two pronged approach: identity management and derivatives (SSO, federations) and application interoperability standards like OKI-OSID, as a basic foundation for developing user centric environments.”

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Nota: No me gusta el término “nuevas tecnologías”, ya que todo lo nuevo llega un momento que se convierte en antiguo (es ley de vida). Además, hay nuevas tecnologías que no tienen nada que ver con la información y las comunicaciones. Tampoco me gusta el término TIC (“tecnologías de la información y las comunicaciones”). Me encanta el término INFORMÁTICA. Pero como soy ingeniero en informática (y a mucha honra) y para que no me acusen de corporativismo normalmente utilizo el término “tecnologías digitales” ya que la clave está en ser capaz de digitalizar algo (romperlo en trozos pequeños y asignar un número a cada trozo). En ese momento ya puedes manipularlo con un ordenador y mandarlo a la otra parte del mundo.