EDULEARN 09 Conference Paper

EDULEARN09 the International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies will be held in Barcelona (Spain), on the 6th, 7th and 8th of July, 2009.The main objective of the conference is to promote and disseminate the experiences in New Technologies in Education and E-learning in all educational fields and disciplines.EDULEARN09 will be a unique International Forum for those who wish to present their projects and discuss the innovations and the latest innovations and results in the field of New Technologies in Education, E-learning and methodologies applied to Education and Research. This conference will be held at international level, counting with the participation of attendants from all parts and continents of the world.
The JISC team decided to attend this conference as it is a brilliant opportunity to put uCampus on a global platform. The abstract, written by Dr. Peng was submitted to the EDULEARN committee in April 2009 and soon after we received acceptance and were invited to write a paper in May 9 and attend the conference in July. After initial discussions the team decided to call the paper “VISUALISING FUTURE LEARNING SPACES IN CONTEXT: THE SHEFFIELD EXPERIMENT”.
The paper describes the design and development of uCampus platform, data and client. But mainly it focuses on the experiment carried out with students in the University of Sheffield taking the Interactive Urban Visualisation Modelling module (henceforth IUVM), which is required for the school’s Masters in Sustainable Architectural Studies, and can be taken as an elective for the MSc in Sustainable Architecture and Computer Aided Environmental Design, and the MAs in Urban and Architectural Design. IUVM is a combination between a typical architectural design studio and an advanced CAD module. Students were expected to submit design proposals based on a given brief while making maximum use of the uCampus platform in order to analyse and understand the current situation, derive the relevant data that will aid them in the design process, share ideas and exchange opinions with fellow students, and present the product of their work to the studio reviewers. Enrolled in the IUVM module were 22 students from various countries, whose educational background is typically architecture but also encompasses other disciplines associated with the built environment such as engineering, town planning, etc.
The paper goes on to describe the different file formats the students were asked to work with and also outlines their experiences, and results. Although we have briefly mentioned in the conclusion the various other applications of uCampus and its user groups and future potential, it was not possible to include these in detail within the scope of this paper because of time restrictions and word limits. However, the team plans to outline these in detail at the conference during the presentation of the paper and hope to generate interest among a wider audience. It has been decided that Panagiotis Patlakas and myself will be representing the team in at the conference to present the paper in July 09.
This is the team’s first paper and we are all very excited to find out what opportunities it brings for uCampus .

uCampus Release 0.04a

We have now released version 0.04a of uCampus. There are a number of new features in this increment so it is quite a significant update for the platform. Our enhanced interactive map is now a central feature of the user interface and provides a visual means of object selection to complement our existing interface. We have also georeferenced our map and this has enabled us to interface to Google Street View so that users can effortlessly find campus locations from directly within our application.

In general, the application is becoming more and more feature rich over time and this is reflected in the tool button additions to the user interface. Behind the scenes, we have implemented the second generation of our XML schema which will open the way for some more advanced features that we are planning in the next interation.

In addition, uCampus 0.04a is now a tenth of the download size than the previous version. This means that we can now employ Java Web Start technology as a means of client deployment. We hope that this will greatly simplify the distribution process for our users and ensure that they are always using the latest version of our software.

External Project Evaluation Development

Last week the weCAMP project team attended a project evaluation workshop organised by Diane Hart & James Pinder [the projects external evaluators]. The session was a good opportunity to discuss the development of the project and check that the project was meeting the objectives agreed at the outset. The group discussed a draft logic plan, formative and Summative evaluation techniques and how these elements would be integrated in the the project evaluation report. It was a good opportunity for the project team to reflect on the work so far and ensure that milestones and targets were correctly identified for the remainder of the project.