Open University of Catalonia

About: Open University of Catalonia is a education organization based out in Barcelona, Spain. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Context (language use) & Higher education. The organization has 1943 authors who have published 4646 publications receiving 64200 citations. The organization is also known as: Universitat Oberta de Catalunya & UOC.

Multi-actor networks and innovation niches: university training for local Agroecological Dynamization

Abstract: The global environmental and social-economic crises of industrialized agriculture have led to the emergence of agroecology as an alternative approach aiming to increase the ecological, social and economic sustainability of agri–food systems. The ‘multi-level perspective’ is now a widely used framework to understand and promote the upscaling of local innovation niches, such as agroecology, to broader scales (e.g., regional, national, international), thus reconfiguring the dominant socio-technical regimes. Additionally, emergent ‘hybrid forums’ can provide a space between niche and regime where niche innovators can become important actors in scaling up and out emergent innovations. In this paper, we examine a university training program (Postgraduate Diploma in Local Agroecological Dynamization at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona), to better understand its role as a ‘hybrid forum’. Our analysis focuses especially on how the program, as an example of a hybrid forum, worked to reconfigure practices, concepts, and tools of local development practitioners. We also assess to what extent the program contributed to transitioning local development institutions toward agroecology. An online survey (n = 46) and in-depth interviews (n = 16) were carried out to determine how the training program has impacted the student’s opinions and their respective institutions. The results show that most of the students consider that they have acquired new theoretical frameworks and useful methods to re-framing their local development projects, that new alliances with multi-actor networks have been perceived, and that some internal changes of the local development practices have taken place. We conclude that the training program, as a hybrid forum, is capable of outscaling niche innovations through linkages with different kind of actors both from the niche and the regime. Political changes in the socio-technical landscape level offer an opportunity to amplify the impact of the innovations which are being generated by those multi-actor networks, but with a limited multi-level impact as far as institutional regime-actors not aligned with agroecological transition keep the most of the competencies on agri–food systems.

Interacción entre la evaluación continua y la autoevaluación formativa: La potenciación del aprendizaje autónomo

Abstract: RESUMEN En el contexto del aprendizaje a lo largo de toda la vida y del aprendizaje autonomo, caracteristicos del Espacio Europeo de Educacion Superior, es preciso fomentar la autoevaluacion formativa, como complemento a la evaluacion continua. Mediante este tipo de autoevaluacion, el estudiante puede ir aplicando los conocimientos y ejercitando las diferentes competencias a alcanzar en cada asignatura. Con lo cual, estara en mejor disposicion de ser evaluado durante y, en su caso, al final del proceso de aprendizaje. Las actividades de autoevaluacion deben estar disenadas para que sean utiles para los estudiantes (formato, contenido, complejidad…), siendo especialmente importante el retorno inmediato, lo mas detallado posible, que se proporciona al estudiante sobre los resultados obtenidos. ABSTRACT In the context of the lifelong learning and the autonomous learning, both concepts typical of the European Higher Education Area, it is necessary to encourage the use of self-assessment tools as a complement of the continuous assessment activities. Working with this kind of self-assessment tools, students are able to train and put into practice the different competencies needed to be achieved at the end of each subject or course. This means that students will be better prepared to be assessed not only at the end but also during all the learning process. Self-assessment activities have to be designed to be totally useful for the students (taking into account the format, content, complexity...), and being especially important the immediate feedback, detailed as much as possible, that students get about their results.

A Practical Implementation Attack on Weak Pseudorandom Number Generator Designs for EPC Gen2 Tags

Abstract: The Electronic Product Code Generation 2 (EPC Gen2) is an international standard that proposes the use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) in the supply chain. It is designed to balance cost and functionality. As a consequence, security on board of EPC Gen2 tags is often minimal. It is, indeed, mainly based on the use of on board pseudorandomness, used to obscure the communication between readers and tags; and to acknowledge the proper execution of password-protected operations. In this paper, we present a practical implementation attack on a weak pseudorandom number generator (PRNG) designed specifically for EPC Gen2 tags. We show that it is feasible to eavesdrop a small amount of pseudorandom values by using standard EPC commands and using them to determine the PRNG configuration that allows to predict the complete output sequence.

Towards personalization in digital libraries through ontologies

Abstract: Purpose – To describe a browsing and searching personalization system for digital libraries based on the use of ontologies for describing the relationships between all the elements which take part in a digital library scenario of use.Design/methodology/approach – Identification of all the desired functionalities and requirements that are necessary to fully integrate the use of a digital library in an e‐learning environment, and the basic elements that are used to build the ontology that describes such scenario.Findings – The elements that determine the functionalities of the desired personalization system: first, the user's profile, including navigational history and user preferences; and second, the information collected from the navigational behavior of the digital library users.Research limitations/implications – The ontology is not complete. In fact, the ontology in itself will evolve with the new apparition of desired functionalities and requirements of the personalization system.Practical implicatio...