Developing a distributed electronic health-record store for India

The DIGHT project is addressing the problem of building a scalable and highly available information store for the Electronic Health Records (EHRs) of the over one billion citizens of India

Mapping web personal learning environments

A recent trend in web development is to build platforms which are carefully designed to host a plurality of software components (sometimes called widgets or plugins) which can be organized or combined (mashed-up) at user's convenience to create personalized environments. The same holds true for the web development of educational applications. The degree of personalization can depend on the role of users such as in traditional virtual learning environment, where the components are chosen by a teacher in the context of a course. Or, it can be more opened as in a so-called personalized learning environment (PLE). It now exists a wide array of available web platforms exhibiting different functionalities but all built on the same concept of aggregating components together to support different tasks and scenarios. There is now an overlap between the development of PLE and the more generic developments in web 2.0 applications such as social network sites. This article shows that 6 more or less independent dimensions allow to map the functionalities of these platforms: the screen dimensionmaps the visual integration, the data dimension maps the portability of data, the temporal dimension maps the coupling between participants, the social dimension maps the grouping of users, the activity dimension maps the structuring of end users–interactions with the environment, and the runtime dimensionmaps the flexibility in accessing the system from different end points. Finally these dimensions are used to compare 6 familiar Web platforms which could potentially be used in the construction of a PLE

FORGE: An eLearning Framework for Remote Laboratory Experimentation on FIRE Testbed Infrastructure

The Forging Online Education through FIRE (FORGE) initiative provides educators and learners in higher education with access to world-class FIRE testbed infrastructure. FORGE supports experimentally driven research in an eLearning environment by complementing traditional classroom and online courses with interactive remote laboratory experiments. The project has achieved its objectives by defining and implementing a framework called FORGEBox. This framework offers the methodology, environment, tools and resources to support the creation of HTML-based online educational material capable accessing virtualized and physical FIRE testbed infrastruc- ture easily. FORGEBox also captures valuable quantitative and qualitative learning analytic information using questionnaires and Learning Analytics that can help optimise and support student learning. To date, FORGE has produced courses covering a wide range of networking and communication domains. These are freely available from FORGEBox.eu and have resulted in over 24,000 experiments undertaken by more than 1,800 students across 10 countries worldwide. This work has shown that the use of remote high- performance testbed facilities for hands-on remote experimentation can have a valuable impact on the learning experience for both educators and learners. Additionally, certain challenges in developing FIRE-based courseware have been identified, which has led to a set of recommendations in order to support the use of FIRE facilities for teaching and learning purposes

HealthyGrowth - From niche to volume with integrity and trust

Die Märkte für ökologisch erzeugte Nahrungsmittel unterscheiden sich zwar in den europäischen Ländern. In allen aber ist eine Steigerung des ökologischen Handelsvolumens erwünscht, wobei kleine wie große Vermarkter mit spezifischen Problemen konfrontiert sind. Während kleine Unternehmen oder Initiativen oft an der Verfügbarkeit großer Mengen scheitern, müssen sich große Unternehmen der Herausforderung stellen, den umfassenden Qualitätsanforderungen gerecht zu werden und dem Kunden die Werte ökologisch produzierter Nahrungsmittel glaubhaft zu vermitteln. Das Projekt HEALTHYGROWTH beruht auf der Kooperation von elf Partnern. Das deutsche Team leistet einen Beitrag zu den Arbeitspaketen WP2 bis WP6 und ist verantwortlich für WP7. Die deutschen Fallstudien von mittelgroßen ökologischen Wertschöpfungsketten werden in unterschiedlichen Unternehmen oder Initiativen jeweils mit spezifischen Untersuchungsschwerpunkten stattfinden. Die vergleichende Auswertung der Fallstudien wird thematisch nach Themenfeldern aufgefächert. Diese mehrdimensionale Analyse soll beim Verständnis der Mechanismen wachsender organischer Wertschöpfungsketten helfen. Eine Aufgabe des HNEE-Teams besteht in der Koordination des Transfers von Ergebnissen in Wissenschaft und Praxis. Schlüsselpersonen der Branche werden von Beginn an konsequent eingebunden, um die Praxisrelevanz des Ansatzes und eine effektive Verbreitung der Ergebnisse durch Veröffentlichungen, Seminare usw. zu gewährleisten. Hauptbestandteil der Projektarbeit ist neben den Veröffentlichungen die konsequente Einbindung von Vertretern ökologischer Wertschöpfungsketten. Wissenstransfer und gemeinsame Lernprozesse auf nationaler Ebene und über Ländergrenzen hinweg sind Schwerpunkte im Arbeitspaket WP7, das das deutsche Team leitet. Das deutsche Teilprojekt zielt, ebenso wie das Gesamtprojekt, insbesondere auf den Wissens- und Erfahrungsaustausch ab. Die Verwertung der Ergebnisse besteht vor allem in der Verbreitung von Informationen zu Besonderheiten der Wachstumsprozesse innerhalb der Wertschöpfungskette. Hierzu trägt auch der BLE-Ergebnisflyer bei. HEALTHYGROWTH will Erkenntnisse aus verschiedenen Ländern und Unternehmen bündeln und an die Akteure und ihre Netzwerke weitergeben. Zielgruppen sind nicht nur mittelgroße Bio-Nahrungsmittelhändler, sondern auch Kleinerzeuger und Unternehmen, die sich für neue Formen von Partnerschaften und Kooperationen im ökologischen Nahrungsmittelsektor interessieren. Angaben zur Finanzierung des Projekts finden Sie im Förderkatalog des Bundes unter http://foerderportal.bund.de/foekat/jsp/StartAction.do. Bitte geben Sie in das Suchfeld eine 28 plus das Förderkennzeichen (FKZ) des BÖL-Projektes ein, z.B. 2808OE212 für das BÖL-Projekt mit der FKZ 08OE212

An IoT-based solution for monitoring a fleet of educational buildings focusing on energy efficiency

Raising awareness among young people and changing their behaviour and habits concerning energy usage iskey to achieving sustained energy saving. Additionally, young people are very sensitive to environmental protection so raising awareness among children is much easier than with any other group of citizens. This work examinesways to create an innovative Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) ecosystem (including web-based, mobile, social and sensing elements) tailored specifically for school environments, taking into account both theusers (faculty, staff, students, parents) and school buildings, thus motivating and supporting young citizenś behavioural change to achieve greater energy efficiency. A mixture of open-source IoT hardware and proprietary platforms on the infrastructure level, are currently being utilized for monitoring a fleet of 18 educational buildings across 3 countries, comprising over 700 IoT monitoring points. Hereon presented is the system's high-level architecture, as well as several aspects of its implementation, related to the application domain of educational building monitoring and energy efficiency. The system is developed based on open-source technologies andservices in order to make it capable of providing open IT-infrastructure and support from different commercial hardware/sensor vendors as well as open-source solutions. The system presented can be used to develop and offer newapp-based solutions that can be used either for educational purposes or for managing the energy efficiency ofthebuilding. The system is replicable and adaptable to settings that may be different than the scenarios envisionedhere (e.g., targeting different climate zones), different IT infrastructures and can be easily extended to accommodate integration with other systems. The overall performance of the system is evaluated in real-world environment in terms of scalability, responsiveness and simplicity