Geolocator4learning

Editor's Notes

• #2: Good morning to you all. Today Jose Cano and myself will present the project geolocator.
• #3: The geolocator,project, or Interactive Map of Students and Alumni, is an innovation project for management staff. Its goal is to implement a geolocator tool in the virtual learning environment of the UOC, in order to enhance the community mainly between two profiles of users, wich are students and alumni. Because of that, we are developing this project in collaboration with Adolfo Revuelta, from “Alumni”, and Mercè Guillén, from “Informació a l’Estudiant.”
• #4: Which is the justification of this project? Well… I’m sure you know google maps, foursquare or facebook places
• #5: Then we think that… We also want to promote… And as you know current tools…
• #6: This geolocator project forms part of the strategic plan to promote participation at the campus, and here you have the most important projects in this sense. In order to contextualize this geolocator project, I will explain very short our hole vision in this sense. In order to enhance the community at the virtual campus, we have mainly two spaces, wich are my uoc and my profile. My profile 2.0 is a reconceptualization of the current space of my profile of the campus, including social networks and the possibility to generate personal blogs and wikis. We will also find here the microblogging and the geolocator project. In the home page users will find, besides the new webmail and current widgets, tools for social bookmarking and sharing files (we are now studying the possibility of implementing dropbox in the virtual campus). And apart from that, we want also to generate the possibility of choosing friends among the users of the virtual campus; with this widget, users can have fast access to their friends through the projects of chat, microblog and geolocator.
• #7: In order to enhance the community at the virtual campus and foster participation, we have mainly two spaces, wich are my uoc and my profile.
• #8: My profile 2.0 is a reconceptualization of the current space of my profile of the campus, including social networks and the possibility to generate personal blogs and wikis. At the future, we will also find here the microblogging for community and the geolocator project.
• #9: In the home page users will find, besides the new webmail and current widgets, tools for social bookmarking and sharing files (actually, we are now studying the possibility of implementing dropbox and diigo in the virtual campus).
• #10: And apart from that, we also want to generate the possibility of choosing friends among the users of the virtual campus; with this widget of friends, users will have fast access to their favourite users of the campus through the tools of chat, microblog for the community and geolocator.
• #11: Now I want to explain a brief story of this project. This project was created thanks to the concurrency of various groups at the UOC with the same idea: that is, the importance of applying geolocation to the virtual campus. This groups were Eva de Lera and Carles Fernàndez, on the other hand, Guillem Garcia from “Aplicacions” and Adolfo Revuelta from “Alumni”, and last but not least, Xavi Aracil and myself from Community Labs. Guillem and Adolfo have presented this proposal in the call for innovation projects and they have been successful, but unfortunately, they had no resources to do that and they transferred the project to the Community Labs. Refering to development, we have tried to ask for that from East Village Interactive,who is a new supplier from India, but the experience has not been so good, and we think it’s necessary to take into account some comments about that: It’s true that we had to send them the more specified information in terms of accessibility, but they have not followed the recommendations of design, that are very specified. Apart from that, it takes a lot of time for us to integrate some functionalities within the virtual campus. This situation has taken up a lot of time of both Arantxa Hernàndez, Irene Manresa and Jose Cano in order to adapt the look & feel, implement correctly the css’s of the geolocator and to solve certain mistakes of development.
• #12: Finally, I want also explain that Irene has carry out the user tests of the application. She test the geolocator project with six alumni and five students. This test was very useful in order to improve usability and it help us in the decision making of the project. It’s important to note that these users found this tool useful in order to… Now, Jose Cano explain to you the characteristics and functionalities of this tool.