Dream, will and change

A brief collection of Web pointers on Sustainable & Future Cities

2010-12-01T01:42:00.002Z

http://sustainablecities.net/
http://globeaward.org/criteria_sustainable_city_award
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/0907/09070901
http://worldcities.com.sg
http://www.futurecity.org/
http://www.gardenvisit.com/history_theory/library_online_ebooks/architecture_city_as_landscape/eco_city_plans_sustainable_cities
http://ecosistemaurbano.tv/2010/11/planning-sustainable-cities/
http://geoexpressions.blogspot.com/2010/06/bim-expanded.html
http://www.forumforthefuture.org/press-release/sustainable-cities-2010-resources-for-media
http://www.acfonline.org.au/uploads/res/2010_ACF_SCI_A3_Comparative_Table.pdf
http://www.amazon.com/Taking-Sustainable-Cities-Seriously-Environmental/dp/0262661322
http://www.ebookee.com/Sustainable-Cities-for-the-Third-Millennium_768047.html
http://www.observatoire.veolia.com/en/urban-typologies/
http://www.projetosurbanos.com.br/
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/724360/description#description
http://blog.cunysustainablecities.org/2010/03/the-shrinking-of-detroit/
http://vimeo.com/12364465
http://www.alga.asn.au/policy/planhouse/FutureCities.pdf
http://www.newgeography.com/content/00569-reviving-city-aspiration-a-study-challenges-facing-new-york-citys-middle-class
http://www.asbec.asn.au/files/ASBEC%20report%20cities%20of%20the%20future.pdf
http://cli.ccl-cca.ca/pdfs/ReadingFuture/FutureLiteracyLargestCities2010_EN.pdf
https://www.wsaa.asn.au/Media/Press%20Releases/20100609%20Ozwater%2010%20Outcomes.pdf
http://globaldashboard.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/A_Tale_of_Two_Cities.pdf
http://ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/sources/docgener/studies/pdf/urban/stateofcities_2007.pdf

Liberopinion: a web platform for enhancing e-Democracy

2010-11-01T19:14:00.001Z

The Liberopinion presentation at e-Challenges this end October in Varsaw, Poland

Liberopinion: a web platform for enhancing e-Democracy

View more presentations from Luis Borges Gouveia.

Liberopinion: Democracy for a New Age

2010-10-17T21:45:00.001+01:00

Web 2.0 technology for supporting Elections and ongoing govern debate actions.

Presentation made for the European e-democracy awards from World e.gov forum

Liberopinion: Democracy for a New Age

View more presentations from Luis Borges Gouveia.

Digital Cities seminar at London UEL

2010-09-21T10:15:00.000+01:00

UEL Research Seminar Series 2010-11

When: 15 September 2010 commencing 4 p.m.
Where: EBG05, UEL

Title: "Beyond digital cities: a territorial concern on how to cope with globilisation"

Speaker: Professor Luis Borges Gouveia, Fernando Pessoa University, Portugal. Prof Gouveia gained his PhD from the University of Lancaster, and since then he has produced academic and consultative outputs mainly on Digital Cities. He was project leader for one of the most original and successful Digital Cities so far developed, GAIA Digital. His slides can be viewed here: http://www.slideshare.net/lmbg/globalisation-and-digital-cities

Globalisation and digital cities

2010-09-19T19:03:00.001+01:00

The slides that support the talk on University of East London on 15th September 2010

Globalisation and digital cities

View more presentations from Luis Borges Gouveia.

Ice b poster

2010-07-12T16:17:00.001+01:00

A study on the usage of mobile devices vs desktops in collaborative environments
An approach based on flow experience

Ice b poster

View more documents from Luis Borges Gouveia.

Liberopinion as an enabling platform for elections 2.0: a case study

2010-07-11T13:47:00.001+01:00

A new proposal that test some of the ideas proposed by egov 2.0 and e-participation

Liberopinion as an enabling platform for elections 2.0: a case study

View more presentations from Luis Borges Gouveia.

Digital Paradox: why place matters, putting place in its place!

2010-05-18T09:22:00.001+01:00

These are my slides at http://www.swicthconf.com
It was a great weeekend with a mix of computer scientists, entrepeneurs, a bunch of tech young guys and other people who with strong ideas. It was great and a get the notion that we have already some future in the present time - there's new kids on the block - YES!
Here it is my contribution and the defence that the best new tools will be related with the notion of real time and spce where we physical interact (although we need to consider the digital and its opportunities).

Digital Paradox: why place matters, putting place in its place!

View more presentations from Luis Borges Gouveia.

Physical space & the digital factor

2010-05-04T19:37:00.002+01:00

Here it is my last Ignite presentation video.
The presentation is about physical space and how it will be changed by the digital.

The main idea is to defend the importance of physical space even in a digital world.
Play my 5 minutes argument!

What’s up with the physical dimension in the digital world?

2010-03-07T22:38:00.001Z

This is some of my research focus. I have the opportuity to share some ideas related in the Ignite event in Oporto. Here it is the 20 slides used...

What’s up with the physical dimension in the digital world?

View more presentations from Luis Borges Gouveia.

My students and shared resources: Design of a supervision tool

2010-03-02T15:29:00.001Z

Also in the EuroSakai 2010 event a new tool has been presented. It help to support the relationship between students and its supervisor. The tool, designed Supervision, supports the supervision activity by placing all the students from a given supervisor. It also integrate administrative information and provides aggregate information for the school direction. It is clear, an information management tool that helps to minize the burden to keep up date, all the information about student supervision status.

My students and shared resources: Design of a supervision tool

View more presentations from Luis Borges Gouveia.

Site Stats: The power of event tracking at a single click in Sakai

2010-03-02T15:24:00.001Z

At EuroSakai, this time with the most popular tool developed by the UFP-UV team - Site Stats

Site Stats: The power of event tracking at a single click in Sakai

View more presentations from Luis Borges Gouveia.

Forrester trends on dev for 2010

2010-01-11T20:56:00.000Z

Forrester (http://www.forrester.com) recommends that application development professionals make five key changes in 2010:
1) embrace cloud as an emerging platform;
2) find your inner startup;
3) favor flexibility and cost over platform loyalty;
4) become passionate about user experience; and
5) find and coach your talent.

Overall goal: Become lean and mean to be ready to move as the Great Recession wanes, thus leaving no doubt of development team's contribution to improving business efficiency and driving increased revenue.

Imagine 2010 in global forecasting

2010-01-06T14:58:00.000Z

Fast Future’s 50 Forecasts for 2010

50 forecasts for the world in 2010.

Those forecast wre proposed by Rohit Talwar

CEO of Fast Future www.fastfuture.com

Global Challenges

1. Facing up to Ageing - In the developed economies, lifespan estimates are increasing by up to five months every year and there is up to a 90% chance that those under 50 will live to 100. These patterns will be emulated for citizens in the developing economies as their incomes, lifestyles and health outlook improve. At the same time we know our pension systems cannot cope - they were not designed for people lasting 15 years past retirement let alone 35. In addition, with population decline in many developed economies, we know that the ratio of workers to retirees is shrinking - reducing the pool of pension funds available to serve a rising level of demand.

Governments, businesses, the media, society and the pensions industry all have to accept that this is a crisis of our own making - it is not something that's happened overnight. We have had warnings about an impending pensions crisis for over 20 years and have chosen to do little about it. Over the next two years we think the debate will move beyond the current search for blame as people begin to realise that their pension funds won't be able to cope. We will all be forced to think about how we can fund ourselves for a 100 year lifespan. This might mean working well into our 70's, looking at alternative financing and investment models, changing our lifestyles to reduce our spending, ensuring that we will be healthy enough to keep working and keeping our skills and capabilities relevant.

2. Dealing with Debt - The current– potentially temporary - respite in the financial crisis is allowing governments to take stock of the impact of rescue packages on public finances. We know that in 2010 the debt of the richer members of the G20 is expected to rise close to 100% of GDP. Tough choices will be required on how to service the interest payments and bring down the size of the debt burden. Policy options are limited and potentially unpopular. Cuts in public spending, reducing public sector workforces, higher taxes and encouraging inflation are the most likely instruments. These will have a dampening effect on the economy and slow the pace of recovery. It will be interesting to see the choices made by different nations. The impact will be severe on public sector suppliers – consultants, lawyers and other servi ce providers could experience some of the biggest cutbacks. Redundancies in these firms will be an inevitable consequence.

3. Sustainability 2.0 - While we expect a continued focus on environmental sustainability, we also think there will be a lot more debate about the long term sustainability of our governance and business models. What are the right set of processes, voter engagement mechanisms, funding approaches and controls required to manage a country in the 21st century? Is globalisation the right growth model for large corporations, what is an acceptable level of growth to target and what business and financing models should underpin these choices?

Politics Gets Complex

4. New Routes to Change – The range of challenges facing developed and developing economies grows ever more rapidly – as does the outpouring of ideas from every corner on how to fix them. Many governments seem almost clueless as to how to make progress on multiple fronts and how to harness a diverse range of inputs. Despite the scale of the challenges, many are still reluctant to ‘think the unthinkable’ on issue as diverse as effective governance for the 21st healthcare funding, banking regulation and environmental protection. Increasingly we will see foundations and independent initiatives funding such ‘clean sheet thinking’ projects – enabling them to sit outside the political process and consider a wider range of options than most governments would dare to. The results will then be used to facilitate public debate and influence governmen ts from the top down and ‘outside in’.

5. Embracing Complexity - The finance crisis has helped us understand that our world is increasingly made up of highly complex interconnected and adaptive systems whose behaviour is difficult to model or predict. Governments and businesses will increasingly start to embrace complexity thinking to help understand and plan for the world we now operate in. The real breakthrough will come when we start to teach our children about complexity and how to make decisions in an uncertain world with imperfect information.

6. New Rules of Engagement – The failure to reach any serious binding global agreements on climate change at the COP-15 Summit in Copenhagen in December 2009 could herald the end of an era on global agreements. Increasing attention will be paid to finding new models for reaching consensus that don’t require leaders and administrators to fly around the world desperately seeking to configure a deal which then gets ignored in practice.

7. Public Unity - Private Retrenchment –The G20 members will continue to talk boldly in public about collective global action and open markets. In practice, nationalistic attitudes will abound. This will result in more protectionist trade policy, greater competition to attract inward investment, a bias for awarding of government contracts to local suppliers and a tougher immigration stance.

8. Training gets a Boost – We anticipate a number of publicly funded initiatives to support training and retraining from developed economy governments. The goals will be to try to reduce welfare costs, cut or prevent unemployment and speed the economic recovery. Where elections are due, these may be seen as politically motivated acts.

Economic Power Shifts

9. Joyless Growth – A recovery has begun or will soon start in most economies. However, while the headline figures will be positive, sentiment will be slow to recover as markets remain nervous about the potential for a 'double dip' recession. Redundancies will continue, firms will struggle to cope with persistent lower price expectations from customers, and public spending cuts will bite. Even small items of bad news could see market confidence ebb away and economies head back towards negative growth.

10. Analysts find the Future – Investment analysts are still reeling from the client backlash over them missing the downturn and its impact on the companies, sectors and countries they cover. Many analysts are starting to recognise the need to assess far more than a firms’ past performance, order book and product pipeline. Greater emphasis will be placed on assessing the future readiness of a firm or country’s leadership, the quality of the foresight work they are doing, the strength of their external networks and open innovation processes, their preparedness for a range of economic scenarios and their resilience in the face of possible decade of turbulence.

Customer and Consumer Trends

11. Spending - The Playing Field Has Changed - The downward shift to lower priced products and less conspicuous consumption is unlikely to see a rapid reversal in 2010. The spike in sales for Christmas 2009 should not automatically be seen as a turning point. High levels of personal debt, uncertainty over job prospects and general nervousness about the economy could lead to a more permanent 3-5 year downward shift in market behaviour.

12. Savings in Fashion – Despite government exhortations to help spend our economies out of the downturn, many consumers in developed markets will look to reduce personal debt and increase their levels of savings. Economic uncertainty, pensions concerns and healthcare costs will all be contributing factors to this new found thrift mentality. Some may wait for a second downturn before adopting such behaviours.

13. Ethical, Green and Cheap – Consumers will be increasingly willing to buy products with strong ethical or green credentials. However, in the mass market, price will remain a key consideration and it remains unlikely that vendors will be able to charge a premium for such products in the near term.

14. Zero Tolerance – Customers will increasingly vote with their feet or their fingers in the face of poor service or website failure. Whilst they may tell their friends about the poor service experience, they will be less and less inclined to inform the vendor – particularly where the amounts involved are relatively small.

15. Customer Insight gets Neural – A growing number of firms will adopt neuromarketing and related techniques to develop real insight into the neurological basis for customer behaviours. Others will continue to do market research whilst ignoring the wealth of direct customer feedback already available.

Global Business

16. Internationalism Becomes the Norm - In ‘Globalinc. An Atlas of The Multinational Corporation’, Mederd Gabel and Henry Bruner suggest that the number of multinationals has grown from 3,000 in 1990 to over 63,000 today – rising to 820,000 if affiliates are included[i]. This number is expected to accelerate in 2010 as would-be multinationals from China, India and other emerging nations seek a foothold and buy-up troubled businesses in key markets. At the same time, developed economy businesses not already abroad will be looking to enter emerging markets and form foreign partnerships in an attempt to overcome sluggish conditions at home.

17. Africa Bound – In the search for new growth, businesses from developed and developing economies alike will make an aggressive push into markets across Africa. Entrepreneurs from Asia may fare better and see faster results as they are more able to adapt to local business practices to secure opportunities than less fleet-footed global firms.

18. Clipped Wings – The airline industry will continue to experience turmoil as business passengers in particular are slow to return. Casualty rates could be high - airlineupdate.com lists 90 airline failures and 7 mergers for 2008 and a further 31 failures and 6 mergers for 2009. We can expect 30-40 more failures and further mergers by the end of 2010.

Business Strategy

19. Customer Lock-in - Nervousness about the strength of the recovery will drive innovation in sales and pricing strategies. Where possible, suppliers will seek to lock customers in to longer term deals during the early months of the year - with options such as subscription models, long-term discounts and staggered payment arrangements. Equipment suppliers will increasingly have to adopt an approach of providing the product for free and then charging a rental fee or proportion of the savings or increased revenues / profits where these can be attributed.

20. Free or Fantastic – Vendors of both physical and electronic goods and services will have to face up to the fact that hyper-competition and almost unlimited consumer choice are driving prices down to zero. A range of alternative revenue streams are then required to make the endeavour viable. Those that want to generate direct payment will have to demonstrate that their offering is truly fantastic and worth paying for. For example in the UK newspaper industry, the Financial Times has successfully raised its hard copy cover price on a regular basis and charged for its premium content online. In contrast, the London Evening Standard has had to abandon the charging model and move to a free circulation model.

21. Accelerating Innovation - One of the most interesting responses to the downturn has been the rising focus on innovation. This has ranged from a wave of new product launches to radical rethinks of entire business models and operating systems. However, many larger businesses have found their internal processes a barrier when it comes to turning ideas into reality. We think the focus of innovation initiatives will increasingly focus on streamlining decision making to allow more rapid testing of new ideas.

22. Open Innovation – Wave 2 - While there are notable examples of businesses such as P&G and Apple succeeding with open innovation, the reality is that many have struggled to make it work. Internal processes, legal issues and a prevailing mindset of distrust have seen many such initiatives fail. We expect to see three dominant approaches in the next wave of open innovation in 2010. Firstly, some major corporations will bite the bullet and truly embrace the concept. The majority of large firms will followed the route of controlled experimentation to open up particular innovation opportunities around new product development using platforms such as Innocentive. The third will see a growing band of innovators who use open and crowd sourced approaches to conceive, develop and market their products and services.

23. Improving M&A Potential – The downturn has left a number of firms struggling for survival or at least significantly weaker than 18 months ago. The risk of a double dip downturn makes many even more vulnerable. Cash rich corporates, investment funds and even private investors will be more active in seeking out opportunities to acquire and integrate or break up these ‘bargain basement’ businesses.

24. The Quick and the Dead – In most sectors, over the next 12-18 months, we expect to see a wave of new ventures and industry level initiatives taken by entrants and existing players. These are entrepreneurs and firms who took advantage of the downturn to take or accelerate bold moves. The results of their efforts will come as a shock to many in the sector who ‘didn’t see it coming’. A second breed of ‘dead men walking’ will become apparent as traditionally successful businesses struggle to come to terms with a new world order.

Business Operations

25. Leaner and Meaner - Businesses that emerge successfully from the recession should be fitter than before, raising the possibility both of increasingly competitive firms and of a jobless recovery.

26. Sustainability Goes Mainstream - Google’s SmartMeter provides information on your Google home page on how you use electricity and how to be more efficient. The emergence of such applications, and the money they can help save, will appeal in a post recessionary world where sustainable products and services will be increasingly common. The challenge will be to demonstrate that products are truly sustainable in a clear and simple manner.

27. Responsible Investment - As the green credentials of company spending and investment increasingly come under the microscope, the need for a Director of Responsible / Sustainable Investment will manifest itself and become apparent in many organisations.

28. The Listening Organisation - We expect to see more Chief Listening Officers appointed to ensure companies are truly hearing and responding to customer needs, concerns and comments emerging from direct feedback and via the social media such as Twitter.

29. Skills Shortage - Despite unemployment rates of up to 10% in the U.S. and across the E.U., many industries will face continuing shortages in key areas owing to a misalignment of skills required and available qualified talent.

30. Travel Under Scrutiny - Cost pressures and nervousness about a double dip downturn will continue to impact corporate travel budgets. Despite the evidence about the value of face-to-face meetings, travel restrictions will be imposed, and investment will rise in electronic alternatives from teleconferencing to virtual events. This will drive the growth of alternatives to business travel, such as Telepresence and Halo rooms. Increasing political instability in various world regions may also have a restraining effect on travel plans.

31. Telecommuting Grows - Rapidly increasing worldwide broadband connections and real time technology connections now make it feasible to be fully effective from home. Globalised work teams also render the concept of ‘going into the office’ a pointless exercise if your team is on another continent. At the same time, the desire to reduce office space requirements and overheads, cut CO2 emissions, avoid gridlocked transport systems and retain happy talent will all drive the take up of telecommuting.

32. Rise of E-Learning - The desire to maintain skills and motivation while containing costs and responding faster to business needs will see firms and training providers make greater investments in the use of e-learning. Increasing use will be made of virtual worlds to deliver simulation-based training in fields as diverse as healthcare, auditing and financial services.

33. Growth in Software as a Service (SaaS) / Cloud Computing – A growing number of businesses of all sizes will adopt SaaS / Cloud Computing strategies. This trend to renting applications from third party providers over the internet will grow as businesses look to improve the functionality they can offer, increase flexibility and control costs.

Engagement with Social Media

34. Social Networks Harvested - A number of models will emerge claiming to offer approaches to monetizing individual or corporate networks. While some will be transferable from one business to another, many will not prove to be portable from their originators to other entities.

35. Business Gets Social - As yet there are relatively few examples of big companies that have scaled social initiatives beyond one-off marketing or communications initiatives. One exception is Best Buy's Twelpforce, which leverages hundreds of employees to provide customer support via Twitter. Cost and service pressures will see more firms developing business-wide social media engagement strategies that encompass customers, prospects, suppliers and partners.

36. Internal Social Media Policies Tighten - With user rates booming across the social media platforms, and growing pressures on headcount, we could see growing restrictions on the internal use of the social networks. Even where the company understands the benefits and is making an investment in social media, strict controls may be adopted on how much time staff can spend visiting such networks in company hours.

Ethics and Environment

37. CSR Backlash – Product advertising is now full of claims about firms’ ethical and green credentials. However, consumers are becoming cynical about exactly what is being done. There will be real pressure for transparency on exactly how much of the item price is actually being donated to build schools, buy books, plant trees or train a teacher. There will also be a real focus on providing evidence of what is being done with the money.

38. Our Friends Electric - There will be a major increase in activity in the electric and hybrid vehicle markets. Existing car manufacturers will announce a number of new vehicles and concept development projects. New entrants to the sector will start to bring products to market and a number of vehicle projects will find investors. Activity levels in China will be particularly high.

Science and Technology

39. Serving the Masses – We will see rapid growth in mainly science and technology based solutions targeted at the needs of the developing world. Inspired by examples such as the Nokia Money mobile money transfer service, big corporations will increasingly develop offerings targeted at the low income mass markets.

40. Loving the Labs – The government stimulus packages announced in 2009 included a major boost for science and technology investment. Notable examples included 10Tn Yuan (1Tn Euros, US$1.5Tn) in China, 900M Euros in Germany, 731M Euros in France and 685M Euros in Norway. Business and the investment sector will also place a major focus on investment in science and technology ventures as a route to driving new growth opportunities.

Ten emerging areas of science and technology that we expect to hear a lot more about in the next year are listed below:

41. The Rise of Citizen Science – Public participation in scientific research will become increasingly popular. Amateurs will see and seek out greater opportunity to gather data, participate in collaborative studies run by both professionals and amateurs and lend their computers to large scale ‘grid computing’ efforts such as SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence).

42. NBIC-convergence - The convergence of the domains of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technologies and cognitive science offers the potential for truly transformational scientific breakthroughs in fields as diverse as brain science, energy, environmental protection and food production.

43. Synthetic Biology - Synthetic biology involves designing and building basic biological building blocks that can perform functions as diverse as cleaning up toxic waste, growing electronic circuits, and producing artificial drugs food and fuels.

44. Personalized Medicine - Commercial services such as 23andme.com are already available that can read and map a significant part of an individual’s genome for less than $500 in 2-4 weeks. Advances could see the price fall to around $100 to sequence our entire genome in eight hours or less. This would enable medical treatments to be tailored to our unique genetic profile.

45. Novel Energy Sources – As the level of government and private venture capital funding for green technology increases, so the range of candidate technologies will grow. Expect to see regular coverage of ‘breakthrough concepts’ as diverse as energy producing kites, liquid and printable batteries and a variety of initiatives attempting to capture energy from human motion.

46. Food Production Methods – A variety of approaches will be discussed for closing the gap between production and demand. Expect to see Genetic Modification back under the spotlight along with concepts such as vertical farming, salt water farming, precision farming using satellites to optimise seeding and harvesting and artificially reared meat.

47. 3D Printing / Personal Fabricators – Three dimensional printing techniques have been used for some time in manufacturing to create 3D items by bonding particles together layer by layer. As the costs and footprint of 3D printers come down, so the potential emerges for ‘print on demand’ fabricators to be deployed on the high street – enabling stores to offer a far wider range of products while reducing the physical stock holding. The ultimate would be the personal fabricator which sits at home next to the washing machine and which enables us to print items (for example a plate) locally – using ‘recipes’ we have purchased and our own designs.

48. Ambient Intelligence – The expectation is that everyday objects from wallpaper to carpets, furniture and our clothing will all have embedded intelligence and an IP (Internet Protocol) address so that our environments can interact with and adapt to us. For example, picture the scene, we are having a stressful phone conversation, our mobile phone picks this up and responds. It communicates to our clothes to increase the air circulation around our body, requests the wallpaper to display a brighter tone and instructs the photo frame to display a happy or uplifting image. While all of these may sound far fetched, each development is already being worked on in the labs and ambient intelligence is seen as the glue to help link these developments together and shape the environment to the needs of the individual.

49. Self Replicating Artificial Intelligence (AI) – Real world applications of AI surround us – from satellite navigation to aircraft autopilots and washing machine control systems. The next generation of AI programs to emerge from the labs will demonstrate ever greater capacity to learn, adapt to their surroundings and even replicate themselves.

50. The Singularity – The basic concept was popularised by futurist Ray Kurzweil. He argues that we can expect the continued application of Moore’s law – the doubling of computer power every 12-18 months – for many decades. Moore’s law coupled to advances in AI will lead to a point around 30-40 years from now when devices will have so much computing power that machine intelligence will exceed human intelligence. A film on this concept is scheduled for release at the end of 2009 and will lead to widespread debate on the issue.

Creativitylab

2009-11-15T01:17:00.001Z

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Creativitylab

View more presentations from Luis Borges Gouveia.

More on our Sakai implementation

2009-11-08T17:44:00.001Z

Gouveia, L. e Gouveia, F. (2009). Sakai experience from a real setting. (Our) Current ideas on how to explore the Digital Opportunity. EDEN Conference. The Seventh Open Classroom Conference Incubating Creativity and the Capacity for Innovation: open content, social networking tools and creative learning for all. 15-17 October 2009. Porto, Portugal.

Sakai Experience from a Real Setting. (our) current ideas on how to explore the Digital Opportunity

View more presentations from Luis Borges Gouveia.

Site Stats 2.0, a Sakai tool

2009-10-05T15:32:00.000+01:00

SiteStats 2.0 Released!
Announce of the 2.0 release of SiteStats for Sakai

SiteStats allows authorized users to view site usage statistics related to user visits, tool activity and resource activity. This version is available for Sakai 2.6 and Sakai 2.5.

SiteStats 2.0 is major rewrite of previous version with several optimizations, a new exciting ajax-based UI with powerful reporting options and enhanced tool support. This release incorporates over 70 bugfixes and enhancements! (http://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/STAT/fixforversion/11273) (Release notes: http://jira.sakaiproject.org/secure/ReleaseNote.jspa?projectId=10150&styleName=Html&version=11273)

Features:

Overview page with summary information presenting most instructor requested information related to site visits, tool activity and resource activity:

Simple statistics (e.g., 'Most active user', 'Enrolled users that did not visit site', 'Most opened file', ...) New!
Expandable area with compact chart and table view with predefined grouping (e.g., 'By date', 'By user', ...) and filtering (e.g., filtering by user role, date, ...) options New!

Reports page with support for:

User-defined reports, per site New!
Predefined reports, available on all sites New!

Advanced reporting capabilities:

Type of activity to report (visits, tool activity, resource activity)
Time period to report
Target users to report
Results grouping capabilities New!
Report presentation: table and/or chart New!
Printable
Exportable (Excel, CSV or PDF)

Admin tool capabilities:

Browse statistics per site
Build predefined reports to be available on all sites New!
Build admin reports to report against all sites New!

Highly configurable:

Use Sakai database or an externally specified database (support for MySQL and Oracle)
Aggregate events instantly or on a regular time interval (e.g., once a day)
Aggregate events for all sites or only for sites with the SiteStats tool placed
And many other configurable options!

Other:

Support for a large number of tools New! (1)
Apache Wicket as rendering engine
Automatic event registration for tools implementing Entitybroker Statisticable capability (https://source.sakaiproject.org/svn/entitybroker/trunk/api/src/java/org/sakaiproject/entitybroker/entityprovider/capabilities/Statisticable.java) New! (2)
Import reports from other sites (Site Info -> Import from site) New!
Help contents available (English only) New!
Available in English, Portuguese, French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese and Swedish

(1) Some tools can have limited or no support on Sakai 2.5 (unless SAK-10801 is applied)
(2) Not supported on Sakai 2.5

SiteStats 2.0 release information:

List of features
http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/STAT/Features

Screenshots
http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/STAT/2.0+Release+Screenshots

Installation guide
http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/STAT/Installation+Guide

Configuration options
http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/STAT/Configuration+Options

Download
http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/STAT/Home

For more information, please consult the SiteStats official page:
http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/STAT/Home

Sakai keeps going on...

2009-10-04T17:48:00.002+01:00

On July 2009, Sakai 2.6.0 was released!

Sakai 2.6 addresses over 1500 issues and enhancements, including a number of security and performance enhancements.

Overview

Features a number of functionality enhancements, internationalization and performance improvements, and support for IBM Websphere and DB2.
Binds to a reorganized, repackaged set of low-level "kernel" services that are now released separately.
Features a new license, the Educational Community License, version 2.0 .

Sakai 2.6.0 Distributions

Source, binary and demo versions are available at the Sakai Subversion repository or from the Sakai 2.6.0 website.

Documentation and Overview

Sakai 2.6 Documentation (Overview, Installation, Configuration, etc.)
Sakai 2.6 Overview (PowerPoint)

Corporate Governance Network (CGN)

2009-10-04T16:14:00.003+01:00

Corporate Governance Network (CGN) was announced last may.

It provides a worldwide, online community for research in all areas of corporate governance, following the model of other subject matter networks within SSRN.

CGN will be merging with the Social & Environmental Impact Network (SEIN), and will adopt all of Subject Matter eJournals and Research Paper Series, becoming a comprehensive online resource for research in corporate governance, providing scholars with access to current work in their field and facilitating research and scholarship.

CGN is sponsored by the Investor Responsibility Research Center (IRRC) Institute http://www.irrcinstitute.org.

CORPORATE GOVERNANCE & ECONOMICS
View Papers: http://www.ssrn.com/link/Corp-Governance-Economics.html

Description: This journal distributes working and accepted paper abstracts that deal with all aspects of governance related to economics. The journal welcomes research with a focus on how corporate governance affects economic performance or on using tools and methods from economics to study corporate governance. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the effects of corporate governance on the economic performance and decisions of firms, the effects of corporate governance on the development and success of economies, and the use of economic data and modeling for assessing governance arrangements and problems.

CORPORATE GOVERNANCE & MANAGEMENT
View Papers: http://www.ssrn.com/link/Corporate-Governance-Management.html

Description: This journal distributes working and accepted paper abstracts that deal with all aspects of governance related to the field of management, broadly defined and including general management, negotiations, and entrepreneurship. The journal welcomes research with a focus on how management affects and is affected by corporate governance and on using tools and methods from the field of management to study corporate governance. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, how corporate governance affects leadership, management, and entrepreneurship within firms, how corporate governance shapes and is shaped by internal firm processes, and case studies of corporate governance.

CORPORATE GOVERNANCE & SOCIOLOGY OR PSYCHOLOGY
View Papers: http://www.ssrn.com/link/Corp-Gov-Sociology-Psychology.html
Description: This journal distributes working and accepted paper abstracts that deal with all aspects of governance related to sociology and psychology. The journal welcomes research with a focus on using tools and methods from the fields of sociology and psychology to study corporate governance. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, how corporate governance arrangements are shaped by or shape social norms, psychological inclinations, and cognitive perceptions.

CORPORATE GOVERNANCE: ACTORS & PLAYERS
View Papers: http://www.ssrn.com/link/Corp-Gov-Actors-Players.html
Description: This journal distributes working and accepted paper abstracts that deal with the different types of actors and players in the field of corporate governance. The journal welcomes research with a focus on using tools and methods from accounting, economics, finance, law, management, sociology, and psychology to study how different types of actors and players affect or are affected by corporate governance arrangements and practitioners. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, studies related to CEOs and other executives, controlling shareholders, boards and directors, shareholders, creditors, employees, and gatekeepers (including lawyers, auditors, financial advisors, rating agencies, shareholder advisers, and the media).

CORPORATE GOVERNANCE: COMPARATIVE
View Papers: http://www.ssrn.com/link/Comparative-Corporate-Governance.html
Description: This journal distributes working and accepted paper abstracts that deal with comparing governance arrangements across two or more different countries. The journal welcomes research with a focus on using tools and methods from accounting, economics, finance, law, management, sociology, and psychology to study how governance arrangements compare across countries and what are the causes and consequences of these differences. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, comparisons of two or a small number of countries, comparisons of a large number of countries, and the methodology of conducting a comparative analysis in the field of corporate governance.

CORPORATE GOVERNANCE: ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES, HISTORY, DEVELOPMENT, & METHODOLOGY

View Papers: http://www.ssrn.com/link/Economic-Consequences-History.html
Description: This journal distributes working and accepted paper abstracts that deal with the economic consequences of corporate governance, as well as with the history, development, and methodology of the field of corporate governance. The journal welcomes research with a focus on corporate governance as a whole or parts of it. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the effects of corporate governance on performance of economies and firms, its effects on development, growth, innovation, and entrepreneurship, intellectual history of corporate governance work, studies of governance in earlier areas, studies of governance methodologies, surveys of corporate governance, and analyses and studies of the corporate governance field.

CORPORATE GOVERNANCE: INTERNAL GOVERNANCE, ORGANIZATION, & PROCESSES
View Papers: http://www.ssrn.com/link/Corp-Gov-Int-Gov-Org-Processes.html
Description: This journal distributes working and accepted paper abstracts that deal with internal governance, organization, and processes. The journal welcomes research with a focus on using tools and methods from accounting, economics, finance, law, management, sociology, and psychology to study the internal governance, internal organization, and internal processes of firms. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, board decision-making, trading by insiders and related party transactions, firm scope and buy-or-make decisions, internal firm organization, political contributions and lobbying by firms, choices of internal governance arrangements, including charters, bylaws, and policies, and choices of external regulatory regime, including incorporation and listing decisions.

CORPORATE GOVERNANCE: SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY & SOCIAL IMPACT
View Papers: http://www.ssrn.com/link/Corp-Soc-Responsibility-Impact.html
Description: This journal distributes working and accepted paper abstracts that deal with corporate social responsibility and social impact. The journal welcomes research with a focus on using tools and methods from accounting, economics, finance, law, management, sociology, and psychology to study the subject. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, corporate citizenship, business practices and ethics, and the effects of corporate governance and corporate actions on the environment, employees and labor, the distribution of wealth, equity and diversity, consumers, health and safety, and politics and the political process.

The Oxford Internet Institute Research Paper Series focuses on multidisciplinary scholarship from faculty members, students, associates, and visiting scholars on the societal implications of the Internet and other information and communication technologies.
View Papers: http://www.ssrn.com/link/Oxford-Internet-Institute-RES.html

The Rock Center for Corporate Governance Working Paper Series is a source of working papers authored by faculty on the empirical study of corporate governance. Advances in the understanding and practice of corporate governance are most likely to occur in a cross-disciplinary environment where economists, lawyers, financial experts, political scientists, engineers, and practitioners can meet and work together. The Rock Center's goal is to tap this wealth of expertise at Stanford University to advance the practice and study of corporate governance and become an important voice in the debate over governance, both domestically and internationally.
View Papers: http://www.ssrn.com/link/Rock-Center-RES.html

Schools and Social Software Appropriation

2009-06-12T12:11:00.000+01:00

Schools and Social Software Appropriation

View more OpenOffice presentations from Luis Borges gouveia.

Teaching on a Web 2.0 Environment

2009-06-12T12:10:00.000+01:00

Teaching on a Web 2.0 Environment

View more OpenOffice presentations from Luis Borges gouveia.

My twitter id...

2009-06-05T10:02:00.000+01:00

A book on Information Visualisation

2009-03-09T16:55:00.004Z

A virtual environment to share knowledge: A visualisation design to support collaborative learning
by Luis Borges Gouveia
Paperback, 376 Pages, Published 2009

List Price: $99.00
ISBN-10: 3-639-12986-5 (3639129865)
ISBN-13: 978-3-639-12986-1 (9783639129861)

For more information, click on the book covers...

Intelligent cities presentation

2008-11-18T12:25:00.003Z

This is one of my most cared interests.
The territory, the city and the impact that digital has to both our collective notion and appliance of time and space.

Gouveia, L.(2008). Intelligent Cities. From digital to Social analogic. Contemporary Architectural Challenges 08 – CAC08. 24th September. FAUP. Porto.

See the presentation to have a glimpse of my ideas about it!

Intelligent cities: from digital to social analogic

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: spaces virtual)

About learning spaces in higher education

2008-07-15T13:08:00.002+01:00

A presentation about the value of learning space.
It was made at ED-MEDIA 08 and states current research about how the use of learning space affects higher education settings.

Taking the University Fernando Pessoa case, three kinds of learning space are listed:
- traditional classroom or individual learning spaces
- traditional group situations as labs and collective spaces or collaborative learning spaces
- traditional pass by and support places or social learning spaces.

A stream of the Paris Sakai presentation

2008-07-15T00:26:00.002+01:00

A 28 minute performance related with the presentation about distance learning with Sakai can be seen at rtsp://video.cpm.jussieu.fr/Archive/visio/sakai/st080703_7.rm

It includes the powerpoint slides and audio/visual presentation (20 minutes) and a discussion period of about 8 minutes.

Enjoy!

A presentation about distance learning

2008-07-11T23:14:00.002+01:00

As a result of my involvement at UFP Virtual University we were at the 9th Sakai Conference, in Paris, beginning of July.

We try to contribute with a small powerpoint presentation about our flavour of e-learning and distance education at UFP Virtual University.

Feel free to comment!

About Web 2.0 and Higher Education

2008-06-28T13:50:00.003+01:00

One of my PhD students (Luís Simões) presented his work at the following conference:

SIMÕES, Luís; BORGES GOUVEIA, Luís (2008), “Web 2.0 and Higher Education: Pedagogical Implications”. Proceedings of the 4th International Barcelona Conference on Higher Education, Vol. 2. Knowledge technologies for social transformation. Barcelona: GUNI. Available at http://www.guni-rmies.net.

The presentation is available in slideshare:

EATIS 2008

2007-12-16T19:16:00.000Z

--------------------------------------------------------------------
CALL FOR PAPERS, TUTORIALS & SEMINARS

EATIS 2008 - http://eatis.org/eatis2008

Euro American Conference on Telematics and Information Systems

September 10 – 12, 2008 | Aracaju – Brazil

--------------------------------------------------------------------

DEADLINES

January 15, 2008. Tutorial and Seminars proposals submission

March 8, 2008. Short and Full Papers submission

--------------------------------------------------------------------

CONFERENCE GOALS

New Web Opportunities to increase Digital Citizenship

EATIS 2008 aims, but are not limited to, the production of scientific work around e-Government, e-Health, e-Learning, e-Culture and e-Entertainment (local, regional, national and international), Web Semantic, and Web 2.0 communities, contents and technologies.

Submitted papers hopefully should deal with issues about transversal services and applications such as Convergence Digital, Electronic, Mobile and Ubiquitous Applications. They should be oriented towards community and cultural enhancement, to build knowledge and skills for work, to improve work quality, citizenship participation as well as consumer choice.

In particular, EATIS 2008 encourages the use of Information System (IS) and Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), allowing citizens a better participation at various levels of government and public services, as well as the ethics component in the use of services and technologies related to IS and ICT.

PUBLICATIONS OF PAPERS

All accepted papers will be published in the EATIS'2008 ACM-DL Proceedings with ISBN # 978-1-59593-988-3 and will be published at ACM Digital Library (ACM-DL).

Authors of 30% best papers in English will be invited to submit extended papers, which will be further peer-reviewed for potential inclusion in special issues of international journals Journal of Mobile Multimedia (JMM), International Journal of Web Information Systems (IJWIS), and Journal of Theoretical and Applied Electronic Commerce Research (JTAER).

In the same way, authors of 30% best papers in Portuguese or Spanish will be invited to IEEE Latin America Transactions and IEEE RITA - Revista Iberoamericana de Tecnologías del Aprendizaje (Latin-American Learning Technologies Electronic Journal).

FACILITy TO AUTHORS FROM ECONOMICALLY DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

EATIS.org – Euro American Association on Telematics and Information Systems offers 10 Invited Papers (free registration) for first authors that residing in economically developing countries. Selection of the Invited Papers will be done according to the score order obtained in the submission process.

ORGANIZATION

Organized by the Computing Department of the Universidade Federal de Sergipe, this conference is promoted by EATIS.org, and endorsed by the International Organization for Information Integration and Web-based Applications & Services (@WAS).

The conference will be done in technical cooperation with Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), ACM SIG – Special Interest Groups SIGWEB, SIGMOD, SIGAPP, SIGMM, SIGGRAPH, SIGSOFT, SIGMOBILE, and Brazilian Computer Society (SBC).

EATIS 2008 conference is also supported by Universitat de València, Spain; Universidade do Algarve, Portugal; the Faculty of Systems Engineering, Universidad Autónoma de Bucaramanga (UNAB), Colombia; and Universidad de Talca, Chile.

TOPICS

Topics include, but are not limited to, the following areas:

1. Relationship between the Web Architecture and other computational areas

1.1. Software Engineering and Web Information Systems
1.2. Frameworks and software architectures for Web-based systems
1.3. Web-based Artificial Intelligence
1.4. Intelligent Agents
1.5. Knowledge Acquisition and Representation
1.6. Information Retrieval and Filtering
1.7. Data and Text Mining
1.8. Automatic Control Web-based systems
1.9. Metrics Quality Assurance
1.10. Human Computer Interface and Modern User Interfaces
1.11. Usability
1.12. Authentication and/or repudiation Systems
1.13. Web Security

2. Web-based Systems

2.1. (Semantic) Web Services
2.2. Automatic discovery of Web services
2.3. Choreography of Web services technologies
2.4. Proof and Trust on the Semantic Web
2.5. Merging/Aligning/Combining Ontologies
2.6 . Semantic Web applications
2.7. Semantic interoperability
2.8. XML
2.9. Domain mark-up languages (XBRL, HR7, etc.)
2.10. Relational Databases/XML bridges
2.11. Native XML Databases
2.12. Vertical-Domain Applications (ITS, Healthcare, Law, etc.)
2.13. Enterprise Applications Integration (EAI)

3. Distributed Systems

3.1. Middleware Systems for Grids and Cluster
3.2. Semantic Grid
3.3. Software tools for Cluster and Grids
3.4. Grid-based Problem Solving Environments
3.5. Computational and Information Grid Architectures and Systems
3.6. Scientific, Engineering, and Commercial Grid Applications
3.7. Programming Models, Tools, and Environments
3.8. Performance Evaluation and Modeling
3.9. Portal Computing / Science Portals
3.10. Distributed Artificial Intelligence
3.11. Multi-agent systems in information integration

4. Mobile Computing and Applications

4.1. Internet access and applications
4.2. Mobile Multimedia
4.3. Multi-modal architectures and applications
4.4. M-Commerce, M-Learning and M-Entertainment
4.5. Location Bases Services
4.6. Data mining concepts for location based services
4.7. Security and privacy in location based services
4.8. GPS applications
4.9. MMS frameworks and architectures
4.10. In-car and GIS based systems
4.11. Video-conferencing and Tele-presence
4.12. Context aware applications
4.13. Adaptative filters for navigation and tracking
4.14. Security and Quality of Mobile Internet Applications

5. Protocols for Wireless and Mobile Networks

5.1. Protocols for Wireless and Mobile Internet
5.2. Performance evaluation of wireless networks
5.3. Wireless systems simulation
5.4. IPv6
5.5. Design methodologies for wireless systems
5.6. Quality of Service (QoS)
5.7. Security in sensor networks
5.8. Mobility management in next generation networks

6. Web Technologies and Society

6.1. Intellectual Rights
6.2. Web accessibility
6.3. Web Information systems for Disabled
6.4. Web internationalization
6.5. Web information systems for citizens
6.6. e|m-Government, e|m-Learning, e|m-Business, e|m-Entertainment, e|m-*
6.7. Electronic Bank
6.8. Biometrics techniques and privacy
6.9. Internet strategies based on the Internet
6.10. Videoconferencing and Tele-presence
6.11. Preservation of Digital Culture
6.12. Medical Informatics
6.13. Business Intelligence Applications

IMPORTANT DATES

January 15, 2008. Tutorial and Seminars proposals submission
February 15, 2008. Tutorial and Seminars acceptance notification

March 8, 2008. Short and Full Papers submission deadline
June 8, 2008. Short and Full Papers acceptance notification

July 8, 2008. Camera-Ready Papers and Early Registrations deadline
August 8, 2008. Late Registrations deadline

September 10-12, 2008. Conference Days

CONTACTS

For further inquiries please contact: secretariat2008@eatis.org

Conference Website: http://eatis.org/eatis2008

Fluid Project

2007-12-12T01:26:00.002Z

A nice project related with User Experience and the use of a Collaborative Learning Plataform (Sakai): Fluid.

The link of the Fluid Wiki:
http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/Fluid+Project+Wiki

Cofundos, a Web 2.0 like proposal

2007-12-02T23:32:00.000Z

AKSW develop a new proposal for colaborative sharing of innovation and development within the open-source software area. This can be the first of a kind for collaborative sharing that can have some impact on open-knowledge, open-source and web collaboration in general.

Cofundos.org is about revealing bright ideas regarding the development of open-source software and attracting a critical mass for their realization: http://www.cofundos.org

The main idea of Cofundos.org is to share innovative (open-source) ideas, to refine them and to mobilize funding for their realization.
All content contributed to Cofundos is truly open, the licenses are Creative Commons and OSI approved open licenses.

Microsoft Surface

2007-11-22T23:44:00.000Z

Thats really amazing.
It is not an innovative technology, but the fact that is Microsoft that proposes this technology makes us believe that we are entering very soon a world where digital based interaction is escaping computers and come to mobile devices and alternative wearables.

Well done Microsoft!
http://www.microsoft.com/surface/

CLAD papers and presentations

2007-11-13T19:06:00.001Z

At the beginning of this month a research team to where I belong, make a panel on the use of digital facilities and local e-government at the 12º CLAD conference at Santo Domingo, in Latin America.
IT was a great time and a nice opportunity to learn more about a world region where it was my first time.

I was involved in two papers, for each I present the English abstracts. One of the papers was co-authored with my brother.

Outcomes from a digital cities approach for local administration
Joaquim Borges Gouveia, Luis Borges Gouveia

Nowadays, a high number of digital cities inititatives have been deployed in many countries and within a multitude of contexts. Considering the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) and a high level vision for their use regarding the territory, the people and activity within a given region, we can consider that such digital cities initiatives have some impact in the way local administration took both its operations and even its governance. As a result, the paper will advance a discussion on the impact that digital cities can have in local administration and how we should benefict from following such perspective to take advantage of ICT. The discussion follows the author experience in the leadership of one of such initiatives and its experience on the Portuguese digital cities programs since the 90’.

Towards a territory oriented perspective for local e-government
Luis Borges Gouveia

The idea of local e-government has been developed and enhanced for the last decade. The quality of approaches and services already provided has also accomplished to fulfill the initial perspectives and intakes new ambitions. One viable direction to improve the quality of local e-government is to relate all available information as part of the territory knowledge and consider it as georeferenced and the most possible real time usable. Such vision, although is not possible at the moment, may be a direction that provides a new level of possibilities and services that this paper discusses.
As a result, the author defends that a vison where we can deal with generated and usable information related to the territory potentiates both its economy and people, as well turns possible to foster the concept of an intelligent territory. Along with the discussion of the concept, a brief introduction to its implications for local e-government is made.

The Fluid project

2007-11-05T18:28:00.000Z

FLUID Project, a new collaborative project to improve the user experience of community source software. FLUID includes members of the Sakai, uPortal, and Moodle communities who are working together to address the precarious values of usability, accessibility, internationalization, and more within academic software projects. The project is supported by a two-year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. For more information about FLUID and to get involved in this open project, please visit http://fluidproject.org.

Goals of the FLUID Project

Our goal is to help improve the user experience of community source web applications including Sakai, uPortal, Kuali Student and Moodle. FLUID will combine both design and technology to create a living library of sharable user interface components that can be reused across community source projects. These components will be built specifically to support flexibility and customization while maintaining a high standard of usability, accessibility, internationalization, and security. The FLUID framework will enable designers and developers to build user interfaces that can more readily accommodate the diverse personal and institutional needs found within community source. We will integrate these rich, client-side UI components and the framework to support them into existing presentation technologies used in Sakai and uPortal.

In order to encourage user-centered design within community source software, FLUID will also create a designer's toolkit that will offer useful design, accessibility, and usability strategies and documentation. This toolkit will include the results of several heuristic analyses and usability studies, a collection of design models such as user profiles and personas, and a growing library of UI design patterns. Members of the FLUID team will be available to provide usability and accessibility support within the Sakai, uPortal, Kuali Student, and Moodle communities.

Who is Involved?

FLUID is a community source project open to everyone. The project is led by University of Toronto with UC Berkeley, University of British Columbia, York University, and Cambridge University. Other partners include Michigan State University, University of Colorado, University of Michigan, Sun Microsystems, the Mozilla Foundation, and IBM. The FLUID Project is funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. New participants are welcome, and we encourage you to visit our website at http://fluidproject.org to learn more about the project and get involved.

How will FLUID help Sakai?

Our goal is to improve the user experience of Sakai and other community source software projects. The FLUID team is already deeply involved in the Sakai community, and will continue to ensure that our priorities and deliverables are closely aligned to the needs of the community. We will contribute all of our design and technical work to the Sakai community under the ECL and Creative Commons licenses. This will include:

* A collection of well-designed, accessible, and reusable UI components
* Integration of the FLUID framework and components into Sakai tools
* New usability and heuristic studies of Sakai
* Ongoing user research and synthesis of usability data in Sakai
* New patterns for the Sakai UI design patterns library
* A library of user research documentation including personas, profiles, scenarios, and other design models for Sakai
* Increased involvement and input from skilled designers, accessibility experts, and UI developers

Some Sakai important papers

2007-11-02T17:29:00.000Z

Although such paper are somewhat old, they may be interesting to take in mind when we need to evaluate Sakai as an option for choosing an Collaborative Learning System.

1. Final Report to Mellon Foundation - Sakai Project
A report by Joseph Hardin (addressed to the Mellon Foundation) to describe the activities of the Sakai project (2004 - 2005). It provides an historical context to the current Sakai Foundation activity.
http://collab.sakaiproject.org/access/content/group/sakai-educ/Documents/2006/2006_10_mellon_final_public.pdf

2. Interoperability Roadmap (2006)
A roadmap which proposes a number of tasks (without resources or deadlines) that need to be addressed going forward in Sakai.
http://collab.sakaiproject.org/access/content/group/sakai-educ/Documents/2006/2006_07_Roadmap_Interop.pdf

3. Two Page Overview of Sakai
An overview of Sakai suitable for printing front and back as a handout to introduce folks to Sakai.
http://collab.sakaiproject.org/access/content/group/sakai-educ/Documents/2006/2006_08_two_pager.pdf

EATIS 2007 Conference Panel section on Virtual Universities

2007-05-15T20:51:00.000+01:00

EATIS 2007 Conference Panel section on Virtual Universities
16 May, 2007 - Algarve
Moderator: Luis Borges Gouveia, University Fernando Pessoa
Speakers:
Luis Borges Gouveia, UFP;
Feliz Ribeiro Gouveia, UFP;
Maria do Rosário Almeida (UAberta)

The Virtual University concept is again in the university agenda worldwide. As a result of a growing demand for new curricula and the need to train much more people both in quantity and quality, new strategies must be on place. The use of information and communication technologies, the hidden costs of e-learning, and approaches as blended learning place the open source collaborative learning environments at the centre stage. Among the open source offer, two initiatives are the most promising ones: Sakai and Moodle.

The panel will address a brief introduction to the virtual university issues (Luis Borges Gouveia) and presents the experience gathered from the use of Sakai at UFP (Feliz Ribeiro Gouveia) and Moodle at UAberta (Maria do Rosário Almeida).

Our presentation will focus on the adoption and implementation issues of an elearning platform which is an integral part of the University's strategy, and the basis of the Virtual University project (UFPUV) and the new platform proposal for distance learning (UAberta). In both UFP and UAberta cases, mainly oriented towards blended and distance learning. A time slot is schedule for discussion among all the panel participants.

Doctoral Consortium call for CISTI 2007

2007-05-03T13:15:00.000+01:00

Doctoral Consortium

The CISTI Doctoral Consortium provides an excellent opportunity for PhD students to present their work and to benefit from fruitful discussions in a workshop format. The Doctoral Consortium seeks to foster the exchange of new ideas, methods, and applications, and to provide graduate students with a place where they can, informally, present their work, discuss it, and gather feedback.

The Doctoral Consortium is open to current PhD students working in any of main conference areas. Applicants must submit a two-page abstract following the conference guidelines. Graduate students are encouraged to participate and to join the CISTI Doctoral Consortium. Selected applications will be distributed with the conference proceedings. The applications must state the area, school, and the current status of their research and clearly describe the problem or the study area being involved and why is it relevant to the work under development.

Applications must be sent to any of the co-chairs by 18^th May, 2007.

The Doctoral Consortium takes place on the morning of 21^st June, 2007.

Conference site: http://cisti2007.ufp.pt

Co-chairs:
Feliz , Gouveia, UFP, fribeiro@ufp.pt (Full Professor)
Luis Gouveia, UFP, lmbg@ufp.pt (Associate Professor)

Panelists:
Francisco Restivo, FEUP, fjr@fe.up.pt (Full Professor)
Oscar Mealha, UA, oem@ca.ua.pt (Associate Professor)

UFPUV - one portuguese Sakai flavour

2007-03-27T15:22:00.000+01:00

One of the projects that I belong to is the Virtual University project at UFP.
It starts in October 2004 as a Sakai pilot and evolves as the local elearning platform for all the university, running as a production facility since September 2005.

Within these years of experience we support our community with the help of Sakai Collaborative Learning Environment and we have some aknowledgement of our effort.

UFPUV is the new Sakai spotlight at Sakai Foundation website (http://sakaiproject.org)
The full text can be read at the same site.

You can reach UFPUV and consult its Wiki at http://elearning.ufp.pt/wiki

Five years ago...

2007-03-19T16:45:00.000Z

Today is an important day for those who are fathers.
I remember one of such days, when my first son make three years old. I was far away, as I was in my PhD Viva day at Lancaster University in England.

My son was in Portugal (as all the rest of my family). I found myself in a quite stressfull situation... as your may guess...
Five years ago was a special day as I finished the job: a four year path to enter my academic professional track. Since them, a number of events take place with high intensity. This is so true, that I am amazed how so little time has passed.

Anyway, five years later, the times are so challenging has the times that were already passed - which is nice! (and a good sign)

A Web quizz for those who love Matrix

2007-01-27T03:08:00.000Z

Find out the Matrix character that best fit your profile can be funny for the movie fans...

My profile gives Morpheus, which may I confess, I like it!
Anyway try it...

Wii, iPhone and the last mile for human interaction

2007-01-11T11:57:00.000Z

Everyday, a huge amount of new gadgets are introduced around the world.

As described in Wikipedia, a gadget or gizmo is a device that has a useful specific purpose and function. Gadgets tend to be more unusual or cleverly designed than normal technology.

According to this definition, the gadgets proposed by both Wii and iPhone are important ones.

They provide a new perspective on how users can interact without taking the approach to the usual staff in the usual way.

They can be called innovative as both use some already available technology but within a new context and functionality. More important, they innovate in order to transform well know and usual (for us) day to day activities into new experiences.

Playing video games with a console and making calls can be considered for the developed world as normal activities that each family has already have some level of familiarity and from each, at least, one member can be considered an advanced user, with lots of experience using it.

OK, this may be true for the use of mobile phones, but remember that a high number of games consoles have been on use on developed countries from decades now.

Gesture and direct human interaction has been introduced in those two gadgets and this means that things will not be the same from now on. Both Nintendo and Apple provide two real innovations as they propose new ways of doing old things in a different way.

Nintendo Wii
http://www.wii.com
Apple iPhone
http://www.apple.com/iphone/

Portugal panorama - slide XX

2006-11-24T23:25:00.000Z

Portugal panorama - slide XIX

2006-11-24T23:22:00.000Z

Portugal panorama - slide XVIII

2006-11-24T23:21:00.000Z

Portugal panorama - slide XVII

2006-11-24T23:20:00.000Z

Portugal panorama - slide XVI

2006-11-24T23:19:00.000Z

Portugal panorama - slide XV

2006-11-24T23:18:00.000Z

Portugal panorama - slide XIV

2006-11-24T23:17:00.001Z

Portugal panorama - slide XIII

2006-11-24T23:17:00.000Z

Portugal panorama - slide XII

2006-11-24T23:15:00.000Z

Portugal panorama - slide XI

2006-11-24T23:13:00.000Z

Portugal panorama - slide X

2006-11-24T23:12:00.000Z

Portugal panorama - slide IX

2006-11-24T23:11:00.000Z

Portugal panorama - slide VIII

2006-11-24T23:10:00.000Z

Portugal panorama - slide VII

2006-11-24T23:09:00.000Z

Portugal panorama - slide VI

2006-11-24T23:08:00.000Z

Portugal panorama - slide V

2006-11-24T23:07:00.000Z

Portugal panorama - slide IV

2006-11-24T23:06:00.001Z

Portugal panorama - slide III

2006-11-24T23:06:00.000Z

Portugal panorama - slide II

2006-11-24T23:05:00.000Z

Portugal panorama - slide I

2006-11-24T23:01:00.000Z

New ways for interacting in games

2006-11-22T15:50:00.000Z

A new videogames console has been devised by Nintendo. Its name - Wii - has in itself a meaning of how this product can be an innovative one.

At first, a less costly and powerfull videogames console can be somewhat too high risk for Nintendo. However, we (look at this... Wii!) need to know how the market reaction will be, for what really is a huge innovation given by the game commands as they provide beyond the use of wireless and all the hype: the sensing of gesture.

Regarding this, one can expect to play not just with its head and mind, but also, getting out of the sofa and start using movement and some physical exercise to interact with the play. We have already some authors that defend videogames for enhancing mind - now they can also defend videogames for physical exercise.

That what I saw, and that why I may expect a change in the home videogames console market. Stay alert to see how other known brands movements will be, as the case of Microsoft and Sony, and theirs XBox360 and PS3 videogames consoles.

For a quick look of this Nintendo offer, see www.wii.com.

UFPUV - our SAKAI implementation

2006-10-28T23:46:00.000+01:00

UFPUV, means UFP for University Fernando Pessoa, and UV for Virtual University.

The local elearning initiative is the official site for supporting elearning, blearning and presential (or face to face) electronic support.

There are two sites to explore:
- The UFPUV site: elearning.ufp.pt
- The UFPUV Wiki site: elearning.ufp.pt/wiki

Here it is the UFPUV skin for SAKAI, do you like it?

European Sakai Day & Lubeck

2006-10-27T16:00:00.000+01:00

We, at UFPUV, have participated at the European Sakai day at begining of September 2006.

It was a nice one day workshop where we have the opportunity to meet some of the Sakai guys and also to take an introduction in deep Germany as Lubeck reveals itself a nice place to visit.

For those who like to travel, I think it is a place to visit (see more info in Wikipedia) and a nice photo which I took from one of its squares.

SAKAI and elearning

2006-10-23T18:39:00.000+01:00

As a result of being involved in a local elearning project at my university, we have choose a free community software as the platform technology for delivering our offer.

Back to October, 2004, choose Sakai as our elearning platform was an act of faith, but also a strong believe that their its were in fact better than the ones from other alternatives. Then, Sakai was just in its first version and little or almost no documentation and references were available.

This means that we needed to work it a lot. Results from use test and run, we find our way across some problems as the use of portuguese characters, the Webdav compatibility, the interface issues, and some other issues that were first hand problems and that they are now past history. Anyway, we were able to provide a month later, a pilot test for an academic year. It start with just two classes from one of us (first semester), and grows to almost 60 professors involving more than 120 classes (overall, it reaches 1000 students and teachers), gathered between the most entusiasthic tech guys, from diverses areas such as nursering, environment, linguistics, and of course, technology.

After this first year pilot, our top administration saw the potential and provide us with resources and an official virtual university hat that allow us to start production for a second year with more resources and better hardware. From begining, 2004/05, as pilot, to a one year in production (2005/06) leaves us to the establishment of the UFPUV, the Virtual University of Fernando Pessoa University:
http://elearning.ufp.pt.

In the begining of the new year (2007), we will have more news and further advances in using not just the technology, but also the elearning concept in order to take full advantage of SAKAI and try to innovate in its use.

Try the following Youtube video for a description of SAKAI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SkGi_tKBL4

To know more about SAKI, visit http://sakaiproject.org/

About Portugal - my country

2006-09-24T20:37:00.000+01:00

Portugal is one of the European countries. It is also one of the oldest nations with rich history and offers a lot of interesting sites to visit and deserves your interest in knowing more about it.

It is a small country, both in population and territory, but with a worldwide language (portuguese) and a rich culture that is widespread and with strong influence in history all over the world.

You can read more of my country in http://www.portugal.org

Holidays are also a nice time to write a book

2006-08-22T20:03:00.000+01:00

Holidays are, among other things, a nice time to be with the family. As a result, we can enjoy our mutual presence on 24 over 24 hours a day. This is very nice and as the word "we" means four guys for us, this is quite nice and enjoyable.

However, this year I need also to finish a book that I was payed for. This means that some of the time has to be spended on writing.

Near the pool, in spare times, or in early morning, always with a concern to not take much time from family time, I was able to finished the job.

It is a 160 pages book about Electronic Business in portuguese that provides a broad introduction to the theme. I realised also, hollidays are a productive time to write as I was abble to finished the writting within six weeks.

You can take a glance on the book cover, as it is currently being edited and is schedule to be published in December this year.

Getting a sea landscape, not to close

2006-07-22T23:46:00.000+01:00

One of the better ways to relax is to have a nice drink and a sea landscape sight.
I do not know why the sea make me such an effect. It is true that the phrase The Sea's Effects on Mind is part of a well know book by Michael Stadler.

However, in my case, there is a concrete explanation. As time allows me to retire at home, I have a nice place to be with a first line balcony where I can work, read and rest and have the sea as a "wallpaper".

During the past years (a decade), I realise that the sea is closer from home and the coast has been eroded in a visible way. Thus, sea is now almost two meters closer of my home. There's another 298 metters to get wet - hope it stills my life for that, but I believe that in a future not so far away, the place where I have so many good moments will be water covered and part of the Atlantic sea.

Anyway, you can see for yourself the cenary and why I like it, even considering the risk of getting wet...

Plans for my Blog

2006-04-22T19:56:00.000+01:00

I again.
I have some plans for my blog. They are quite simple ones.

I will try to post a nice and useful hint / idea / proposal, once a month.

Will see at the end of two years, if we have 24 or so posts into this blog.

Meanwhyle, the first two posts are "empty" ones, more oriented to my blog aims that of any utility.

oopss... sorry for that...

Starting...

2006-03-24T19:48:00.000Z

After a two year long period writting a blog on my native language, I want to test how an English one can be different.

Is the English language the real world "esperanto" language or we can expect in near future to see chinese and other languages as world substitutes?

Well... as far as I can go for now, lets see what an English blog can provide as a global experience.