PBL for Sustainable Cities. Results of the CITYLAB LA Project

“PBL for sustainable cities” is a three day academic conference held from 19th until 21st of September 2018. The conference will be hosted by the University del Rosario in Bogota, Colombia. The academic conference is open to all academic fields involved in sustainable and urban development in relation to Problem Based Learning experiences. The conference themes are: • PBL experiences in Architecture and Planning Schools , Geography, Sociology, Engineering, Political Science, Urban Management, Economics etc. • Other innovative teaching/learning methods and tools. • Teaching governance and participatory approaches. • Collaborative process with external actors: relationships between stakeholders (universities/ public and private agents/citizens…) • Collaborative process with international exchanges between univesities • Potential from the point of view of the scalability of processes and experiences • Sustainable Development Goals (Sdgs). The Project “Citylab. Engaging Students with Sustainable Cities in Latin America”, co-funded by the Erasmus + Programme of the European Union (www.citylab-la.eu), is aimed at enhancing the quality of HEI’s in Latin America through problem based-learning. Problem-based learning is assumed as an innovative approach for introducing real-world problems into educational programs with huge possibilities to transform the quality of teaching and learning. In order to introduce and spread PBL, the partners of the project (12 Latin American and 5 European) have worked on specific problems through multidisciplinary approaches, with the support of campus teams formed by teaching and administrative staff and policy makers from the different faculties. The Project works on typical urban problems, such as urban planning, conservation, energy and climate change, poverty and crime, employment, etc. which are in general complex, and wicked problems that can only be properly addressed through multi-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary working methods. This academic conference is characterised by a wide range of inspiring lectures, discussions and networking opportunities with experts in the field of Problem Based Learning, researchers and key actors in Sustainable Cities development

Latin American perspectives to internationalize undergraduate information technology education

The computing education community expects modern curricular guidelines for information technology (IT) undergraduate degree programs by 2017. The authors of this work focus on eliciting and analyzing Latin American academic and industry perspectives on IT undergraduate education. The objective is to ensure that the IT curricular framework in the IT2017 report articulates the relationship between academic preparation and the work environment of IT graduates in light of current technological and educational trends in Latin America and elsewhere. Activities focus on soliciting and analyzing survey data collected from institutions and consortia in IT education and IT professional and educational societies in Latin America; these activities also include garnering the expertise of the authors. Findings show that IT degree programs are making progress in bridging the academic-industry gap, but more work remains

International Connections: Resources That Support the Growth and Development of Community Foundations Globally

Documents international linkages between, and support for, the promotion and development of community foundations. Identifies gaps in funding and support

Empirical Study of Privacy Issues Among Social Networking Sites.

Social media networks are increasing their types of services and the numbers of users are rapidly growing. However, online consumers have expressed concerns about their personal privacy protection and recent news articles have shown many privacy breaches and unannounced changes to privacy policies. These events could adversely affect data protection and compromise user trust, thus it is vital that social sites contain explicit privacy policies stating a comprehensive list of protection methods. This study analyzes 60 worldwide social sites and finds that even if sites contain a privacy policy, the site pages may also possess technical elements that could be used to serendipitously collect personal information. The results show specific technical collection methods most common within several social network categories. Methods for improving online privacy practices are suggested

Internet: Culture Diversity and Unification

Culture specifics of the Internet usage is analysed. The analysis done is a preliminary work for the application of the socio-historical theory of human mental development. The practice of the Internet usage is ambigious as it gives rise to both the unification and the diversity. The parameters analysed include the techniques of the hypertexts browsing,\ud and the status/position/rank of the communicators - its influence on holding the floor and turntaking rules, the ways the emotions are expressed while Internet communication, and the way the English language serves the functions of world-wide medium

Giving Around the Globe: 2015 Edition

Giving Around the Globe presents regional profiles of giving by companies based in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America. It then shows where North American companies are engaging internationally, by region and by country

Cloud services within a ROLE-enabled Personal Learning Environment

The ROLE project (Responsive Open Learning Environments) is focused on the next generation of Personal Learning Environments (PLE). In this paper, we first describe the engineering process used to create either a new widget bundle, a group of applications or service widgets. The widgets integrated in a ROLE PLE consist of two cloud-based services, a social networking and a mind-mapping tool, where learners can perform and collaborate on learning activities. We also modified other widgets to create a complete learning experience. The whole platform is running on a cloudcomputing infrastructure and one of the services is using a cloud-based database. Additionally, we describe the initial experiences from using this cloud education environment in Galileo University, Guatemala, in a web-based course with students from three different Latin-American countries. We measured emotional aspects, motivation, usability and attitudes towards the environment. The results demonstrated the readiness of cloud-based education solutions, and how ROLE can bring together such an environment from a PLE perspective

Hemispheric Vision: Jackson School Revitalizes Ties through Latin American Forum on Energy and the Environment

Latin American Studie