Learning Technology

I studied Computer Science at the Barcelona Computing School (FIB) here at the UPC. I got my degree in 1996 and started to work in the IT industry right away. I worked in e-learning and in software for Information Systems.

I am currently at the last stages of my doctorate studies. My PhD thesis is related with tools for the creation and diffusion of e-learning contents and sustainable development.

Yes it is. My PhD Advisor was Miquel Barcelówho has been at the frontline in relating Sustainability, Technology and Humanism by creating master and PhD courses on these topics.

There is a growing group of people that is interested in these subjects and in their relationships. There are other professors who are also doing research in the intersection of the aforementioned knowledge areas; for example, Maria José Casany and Pablo Casado or our graduate student Jordi Piguilleu. We are all member of the GESSI research group.
I have been working intensely for some years now on an Open Source project that implements a web-based educational system: Moodle. When I started, Moodle had a virtual community of something like twenty thousand users. During the last years the community of educators and developers has grown immensely. It is now composed of more than 350 000 people. There are more than 45 000 Moodle active deployments all over the world and the number of its users is well over 20 million.

Previously to my involvement with Moodle, I worked as a professor for the online courses of the UOC (Open University of Catalonia, an online only university in Catalonia funded by the Autonomous Government) and ICT. This experience helped me a lot and inspired me for the development of the internal mail system of Moodle that I developed and that is currently used by the UPC. In these cases you work in a highly contextualized fashion: you can see a photograph of the student you are sending an e-mail to, you know very well the subject about which they are sending you a question, etc.

One of the main themes of my Ph D thesis is finding common points of mutual benefit between the software used for the Wikipedia and for Moodle. This research I do with the help of two students of the Master in Computing that our department started recently: David Castro and Ferran Recio. After three years devoted to this initiative we have seen how the UPC officially acquired this educational platform. It is a nice compensation for our work.

My research has a high element of feedback from the users. In this sense, I am very happy since, when I started to get involved in the development of Moodle, the software was in a very initial state and this created a strong interest from the part of the users.

My work implies being present and active in the world of the web. I work with blogs, wikis, forums, etc. One has to know and see the actual tools the people are using everyday and one has to get involved with them. I live with and eye on the screen! This is sometimes called “Virtual Ethnography” and participant observation.