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October 3rd, 2011 by Administració

Up to Us: Contents for Internet Protocol Television (IPT)

The objective of UP-TO-US is to create a prototype of platform that allows the personalization of IPTV services through the adaptation of contents to the user context and their preferences, for the whole european union. UP-TO-US is a european project with a big consortium that studies the potentialities of IPTV for entertainment, business, education, etc.

Up to Us has an international consortium in which companies and institutions from France, Norway, Poland, Austria, and Spain take part. The project, financed by the Spanish Ministry of Industry Tourism and Trade,  will finish by February, 2013 and the UOC is participating through the desing and testing of use cases of IPTV for e-learning.

April 6th, 2011 by jrivera

Google Books for iPad

Google Books just updated its new App for iPad and it looks really good. Finally, users can search any word, even in old books, and turn the page using a 3D animation.

With Kindle, iBooks and now Google Books, and a bunch of start-ups developing outstanding apps (Inkling, Social Books, Chegg), iPad is becoming the reference device for e-books.

March 28th, 2011 by cfernandezba

Digital books in Spain: a report on the current trends

The Federación de Gremios de Editores de España (FGEE) and the German Sánchez Ruipérez Foundation have presented the results about the ‘Survey on the use of the ebooks in Spain’: Impact of the digitalisation, distribution channels and commercial policies.

We highly recommend you to read more in deep the report. However, in this post we have collected a few of these conclusions:

75% of the editorials are already carrying out some kind of digitalisation, being the Comics the books that are more rapidly adapted to digital formats

By 2011, ereaders will be more used that computers to read books

By 2012, one third of the editorials will offer half of their catalog in a digital format (compare this to the 5% in final 2009).

The trends is that digital books will remain 30% cheaper than the non-digital versions

Regarding formats, EPUB   seems to be winning the race. 40%  of the total books were in epub format in 2010 and is expected to be around 70% in 2011.  PDF use is expected to decrease by 2012.

It is also remarkable to see that 50% of the editorials will develop digital versions for smartphones and tablets, following the trend of high availability of these devices.

Finally, concerning distribution, it seems that most of the editorials are focusing their strategy in the use of joint plattforms that offer the products of several editorials.

You can check the full report here.

Or a draft here

ebook

March 1st, 2011 by jrivera

Developing a Webapp/App Tutorial (II)

Following the previous post, just say that this is not a comprenhensive tutorial. There are a few good books out there to learn Objective C and Cocoa. We will just focus on what you need to do to come up with an App that wraps a WebApp. So first of all, you will need a Mac computer with the latest version of the Operating System in order to develop an App. If your current version is lower than 10.5 you will have to buy the snow leopard CD and install it. This is 10.5. Then update it to the latest version of the OS dowloading all update files, one each time, from 10.5 to the latest version: 10.6, 10.7, etc.

Yes, all that is a pain but there is no other choice than go all along with the process. Once your OS is updated, you must go to http://developer.apple.com and become a member of Apple developer center. After that, log and download XCode, Apple’s development platform, and install it.

Open Xcode, create a View Based Application and name it Test.

captura-de-pantalla-2011-03-01-a-las-173047

Now double click over TestViewController.h and add the following code:

#import <UIKit/UIKit.h>

@interface TestViewController : UIViewController<UIWebViewDelegate> {
IBOutlet UIWebView *webView;
}

@property(nonatomic, retain) UIWebView *webView;

@end

captura-de-pantalla-2011-03-01-a-las-174043

Open the “Resources” folder in the left menu and double Click “TestViewController.lib”. Now you are in fromt of the Interface Builder. You will see three windows: “Attributes”, “TestViewController.xib” and “Library”. Double click on View in “TestViewController.xib” and drop the UIViewController from the library in the resulting View.

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Click on UIWebView and select the arrow in the attributes window.

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Put the cursor over the radio button that is near the delegate option. A cross will appear. Press the mouse button and keep it press until you get the File Owner’s icon in the “TestViewController” window. Now the UIWebView is connected with the controller. Then, connect in the same way the “Referencing outlets/webView” item with the same File Owner’s.

captura-de-pantalla-2011-03-01-a-las-182015

Go back to XCode. Now is time to drag and drop your HTML project into the project. Just drag the corresponding folder with all the html, images ans elemets into the resources menu. A prompt will appear. Select “Copy…” and “Create…” and then add.

captura-de-pantalla-2011-03-01-a-las-175340

Select TestViewController.m, add some code at the beginning of the file

@implementation TestViewController
@synthesize webView;

Release the webView variable

- (void)dealloc {
[webView release];
[super dealloc];
}

Uncomment viewDidLoad and add a few lines

- (void)viewDidLoad {
NSURL *url = [NSURL fileURLWithPath:[[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@”web/index” ofType:@”html”] isDirectory:NO];
NSURLRequest *requestObj = [NSURLRequest requestWithURL:url];
[webView loadRequest:requestObj];
[super viewDidLoad];
}

Where web/index.html is the main HTML file of the webapp, change just in case. Finally, all you have to do now is execute the project clicking on CLick & Run. And it’s done!

February 23rd, 2011 by eloste

Developing an webapp/app tutorial (I)

The Android and Apple App Stores are increasingly popular. And for good reason: they allow any developer to publish their work to a huge audience and at the same time, both implements a micro payments rewarding method that really works.

But many developers, especially those who have been working with HTML for years, think that iOS and Andriod operating systems are more a barrier than a help. Most probably, they don’t know anything about Java for Android and Objective C for Apple. And if they do, they will have to write the same code twice in order to keep both versions up to date.

An increasingly popular alternative is HTML5. An apllication developed using HTML5 is called WebApp. The advantages are easy to see: HTML5 works on both operating systems, it’s easy to find senior developers and the cost of producing software is much lower. Anyway, these applications only work if the mobile device is connected to a network and, what is worse, App Stores don’t accept them. So we are at the beginning again.

A possible workaround is to wrap all the webapp into an App. And This is possible, at least in the case of Apple. At the Learning Technologies Office, we’ve transformed a learning content, “Chenese II”, into an App just writing a few lines in Objective C. And this is what we are going to explain in the next post.

February 3rd, 2011 by eloste

La UOC publica el codi del projecte MyWay

La UOC ha publicat el codi del del projecte MyWay. Està disponible a la pàgina del projecte de Google Code y es pot descarregar per al seu ús.

El sistema ha estat desenvolupat per l’Àrea de tecnologia Educativa de la Universitat Oberta de Catalunya i es publica sota llicència GPL. MyWay permet generar diversos formats de sortida a partir d’un fitxer docbook. Més informació en aquest mateix blog.

February 1st, 2011 by eloste

SocialBooks s’afegeix a la cursa del llibre enriquit

Rethinking Books acaba d’anunciar el llançament del seu producte SocialBooks que permet als editors volcar els seus continguts en un l’iPad en un format que els lectors desprès poden comentar.

L’empresa americana vol facilitar d’aquesta manera la socialització de continguts. Els lectors poden afegir desde la mateixa interfície comentais, fotografies i vídeos i també interactuar amb el contingut desde Facebook i Twitter. Curiosament els desenvolupadors han escollit la Biblia com el promer llibre en ser tractar pels seus sistemes.

No cal dir que el sistema és especialment atractiu per la docència, a on els estudiants poden plantejar dubtes al professor, i aquest pot esmenar errors o afegir explicacions compelmentaries a una obra de referència. La iniciativa s’afegeix a altres com el Kno i és una font d’inspiració per a nosaltres.

Social Books

http://www.rethinkbooks.com/
http://www.getsocialbooks.com/
http://www.kno.com/

December 1st, 2010 by eloste

The Doraemon Project

The Doraemon Project aims to help tutors to give a timely and adequate response to questions e-mailed by their students. Since February 2010, the project has been sponsored by the UOC Innovation Project Aplica, and has been carried out by Joaquim Moré, from the OLT, together with Salvador Climent and Marta Coll-Florit, professors at the UOC Language and Cultures Department.

doraemon_by_janetbb

So far, a prototype has been developed and evaluated. This prototype presents textual contexts in Catalan and English that can be useful for the tutors to give a good answer. These contexts come from several information sources (forums, course-materials, Wikipedia, scholar papers and documents found by a Google-like search engine). The Doraemon prototype combines the speech-act theory with the searching for textual contexts that contain co-occurring terms. This combination allowed us to carry out a methodology that is more scalable and flexible than traditional approaches of Question-Answering tools for e-learning. On the other hand, a particularity of the tool is its influence on the tutor’s life-long learning. The results of the evaluation have been quite promising and, in the near future, it is expected that, by adding semantic analysis and inference rules, the results will improve.

Full explanations of the Doraemon Project have been posted in the blog Surfistes a Càmera Lenta (in catalan). Besides, a paper explaining the project and the evaluation was submitted to the Seventh Internation Confererence on eLearning for Knowledge-Based Society, which will be held in Bangkok on December 16,17 2010. The paper will be available in a special number of the International Journal of the Computer, the Internet and Management.

November 30th, 2010 by eloste

Using QR codes to link paper with multimedia

As we explained some months ago, we have been experimenting with QR codes in the learning environment. Last January we presented, and won, a Teaching Innovation Project here at UOC (it’s an annually internal call) which led us to develop it during all this year. In February, we published 2 books from Lluís Pastor (the director of the Communication studies) with 6 QR codes each one (one in the cover and one per chapter). Every QR linked to a video (published in our virtual campus) where the teacher tried to explain more deeply the main concepts that appear in that unit.
Students enrolled in the course “Expressió oral i escrita” during the first half of 2010 participated in the test. After the end of the course, we conducted an evaluation of the project by gathering information obtained through Google Analytics. We also analyzed the results of an online survey we sent to the participants and a report generated by a specialist company derived from a focus group with a 7% of the participating students.

The conclusions of the innovation project were very interesting. Students showed great excitement about the inclusion of multimedia elements in the books. Moreover, we saw that more important than the QR codes (the access technology) were the videos (the contents), but if the technology didn’t work (or work properly) then students got very disappointed.

November 22nd, 2010 by eloste

UOC and Apertium at Google Summer of Code 2010

The Google Summer of Code initiative is a global funding program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source software projects. The LT Office participated in the 2010 edition mentoring, a task inside the Apertium project. Precisely, Luis Villarejo and Mireia Farrús mentored Arnaud Vié, during three months, in the development of the “Pre and post-editing web environment for Apertium”. This task has been fully accomplished and now the UOC community can take fully advantage of a set of web tools integrated in the Apertium translation flow. Some of these tools are: spell and grammar checking, integration of external dictionaries, logging system, translation memory generation, etc.

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