Press room

[12/07/2010]

Interview with Daniel Innerarity

"In the knowledge society, we can do without intelligent people, but not intelligent objects"

In the knowledge society, which some of us inhabit, clichés are ten-a-penny. The intelligent ones are not the ones who know the most, the wise ones are not necessarily the white-bearded elders, a potato seller is no less creative than an artist and philosophers are not incomprehensible beings who talk only of the ethereal. Or that's how it seems when I interviewed Daniel Innerarity, philosopher and university lecturer who took part in the Education Debates as a guest of the UOC and the Jaume Bofill Foundation. Innerarity, a student who has benefitted from the time to which he belongs, pays as much attention to listening as he does to speaking and appears to practise the art of doubt and reconsider everything in a brief conversation, giving the person with whom he is talking the same value as he does himself as a constructor of this present.

[28/06/2010]

Interview with Roser Salavert

"School success happens in the classroom: teacher, student and contents are the protagonists"

New York, the skyscraper capital, has 10,000,000 inhabitants, of which 1,200,000 are school-age students, divided between 1,400 schools and attended by 79,000 teachers. Some 46% of these boys and girls are enrolled in public schools, where 13% of the students do not speak English and 141 different languages can be heard. Roser Salavert, Catalan primary school teacher and psycholinguist, has spent 20 years as one of the cogs that make the machinery of this whole system work... no matter whether it's Bush or Obama in office. Now general manager of schools in District 3, she defends the argument that educational excellence for all is a reality and not simply a utopia. A guest at the Education Debates, she presented the model that, according to her, is on the way to achieving this.

[10/06/2010]

Interview with Gill Kirkup

"Gender inequalities overlay themselves onto new technologies quickly, so we cannot ignore them"

Are information and communication technologies (ICTs) becoming a new barrier to access to education for women around the world? This is the main question that the experts who participated in the roundtable on "Education, Gender and ICTs" held at the UOC on 20th May tried to answer. Gill Kirkup, a senior lecturer in educational technology at the Institute of Educational Technology at the Open University (UK), chaired the session. She is particularly interested in the ways that gender and technology intersect and has most recently been researching this issue in the context of the use of ICTs for learning and teaching.

[25/05/2010]

Interview with José Manuel Robles

'The digital divide will not close unless we eliminate social inequality first'

Although José Manual Robles is now an expert in the phenomenon of the digital divide, he did not originally intend to study technology. Robles has a degree in Philosophy and a doctorate in Sociology, but he was especially drawn to political philosophy and in particular, everything concerning participation. While researching in digital democracy, one of his priority fields, he realised that the power of the internet offers great opportunities to those who know how to take advantage of them and, likewise, it may be a source of exclusion for those that are left out for one reason or another. Robles visited the IN3 to deliver the seminar 'The Digital Divide: dimensions of technological inequality', where he presented a new concept of the phenomenon of the digital divide.

[04/05/2010]

Interview with Howard Giles

«Everything that appears in the press about the police tends to be negative»

This British professor, resident of the United States for almost four decades, is a recognized expert in social psychology who has been president of the International Communication Association and the International Association of Language and Social Psychology. His studies have focused, above all, on interpersonal and intergroup communication, aspect on which he has received numerous awards and has authored some twenty books. On March 23 Howard Giles gave a conference at the UOC on communication between citizens and police as well as the role played by personal and social identities during interaction between these groups.

[22/04/2010]

Interview with Eben Moglen

“The great oligopolies are going to fail in their attempt to privatise the net”

Most people recognise hackers by the image of them broadcast in the media: experts who systematically and for fun breach the computer security of all kinds of institutions. However, the hacker community is a heterogeneous group, the core of which comprises the fathers of the net and free software, such as Richard Stallman, Tim Berners-Lee and Linus Torvalds. Their work philosophy is based on the free exchange of knowledge, collective creation and the continuous improvement of open-source software. Thanks to the contributions made by this community, its values have become established as one of the pillars of internet culture. Eben Moglen, lecturer at Colombia University, has led this community’s legal battles against the large restrictive software multinationals at the head of the Free Software Foundation (2001-2006) and currently does so from the Software Freedom Law Center. Moglen was the guest speaker at the main ceremony at the most recent UOC students’ get-together.

[15/04/2010]

Interview with Doctor Toni Aira

«Politicians are not here to govern,» claims
Sir Humphrey, «but to do politics»

Doctor Toni Aira is a journalist and lecturer in Political Communication and Public Institutions at the UOC. He also teaches on the Institutional, Social and Political Communication Project at the UPF and is also a lecturer on the Introduction to Communication at the Blanquerna Faculty of Communication (URL), where he has been head of the press office and where he gained his PhD. A collaborator with the Avui newspaper, he has been the editor of the Elsingular.cat paper and can be heard on Catalunya Ràdio, on El Suplement, with Núria Ferré, and on Tot és molt confús, with Pere Mas. He is also the founding president of the Catalan Society for Political Communication and Strategy (SCCIEP) and is a member of the ACOP (Political Communication Association). He also has a number of publications to his name, the most recent of which is the translation into Catalan of «Yes, Minister»
(Sí, Ministre), published by Acontravent.

[06/04/2010]

Interview with François Bar

“We'll get all different kinds of innovation if we get different kinds of users”

Try looking for "day laborers" in Google. It's likely that, right after the Wikipedia entries, you'll get a sad entry saying things as nice as "some of the most violent murderers, rapists, and child molesters, are illegal aliens who work as day laborers". The VozMob project helps immigrant workers in Los Angeles with limited computer access to gain greater participation in the digital public sphere to, among other purposes, fight the bad reputation hate groups are trying to spread about them. It's a platform that lets them create stories about their lives and communities directly from cell phones. François Bar (Dijon, 1958), originator of the VozMob project is a new IN3 Visiting Professor.

[17/03/2010]

Interview with Kul Wadhwa

“People are always going to want to share their knowledge on the web”

Kul Wadhwa is the Head of Business Development with Wikimedia, the non-profit making foundation that manages the famous Wikipedia encyclopaedia and other projects associated with the dissemination of free knowledge. An expert in commercial development, he has held the post of business and alliances manager at the University of Stanford and has ten years’ experience in running the business strategy for various start-ups in the technology sector. He was invited by the UOC to the 4th Meeting of Associate Companies, held this February, where he spelt out in a lecture some of the aspects that have made Wikipedia one of the five most-visited websites.

[01/03/2010]

Interview with Jaap Dronkers

“From the educational point of view, schools where students are immigrants from a single origin produce better results?”

Dutchman Jaap Dronkers is a controversial figure. He knows it and it does not appear to bother him: he is not a politician or out to get something. This professor at the University of Maastricht, specialising in educational performance and social inequality, defines himself as a researcher and this allows him to speak openly, even on delicate matters such as immigration. Why do Chinese students achieve the best academic results? Are certain Islamic values related to the poor results obtained by immigrants of this origin in our classrooms? Why do Koran faith schools achieve better results than state schools at a similar level in the Netherlands? You may agree or not, but his pleasant nature will make you doubt what you think. Dronkers, who has a lot of questions and seeks answers even though they may be uncomfortable, took part in Debates on Education with a lecture entitled The Influence of Home and Host Countries in Immigrant Pupils' Performance.

[11/02/2010]

Interview with Jordi Sánchez

"It is quite clear that the use of digital technologies is a wonderful tool for self-directed learning"

Jordi Sánchez Navarro, Academic Director of postgraduate studies in Information and Communication Sciences at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Open University of Catalonia, UOC) holds a degree in Information Sciences from the Autonomous University of Barcelona (1996) and a doctorate in Audiovisual Communication from Ramon Llull University (2005). He recently co-authored L’ús de les tecnologies digitals en l’oci dels adolescents a Espanya (Use of Digital Technologies in Leisure by Adolescents in Spain), which analyses the impact that new technologies have on adolescence and explores the huge possibilities for integration that they can offer in terms of informal education.

[28/01/2010]

Interview with Stephen Downes

“Internet is making education available to many more people these days”

Known as the father of e-learning 2.0, the Canadian researcher Stephen Downes was recently in Barcelona, taking part in the 6th UOC UNESCO Chair in E-Learning Conference. Downes is senior researcher with the New Brunswick Institute for Information Technology in Canada. Specialising in e-learning and new communication media, his greatest ambition is to achieve barrier-free transmission of knowledge over the internet.

[14/01/2010]

Interview with Manuel Castells

“Power is built, above all, on communication”

Manuel Castells is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Open University of Catalonia, UOC) in Barcelona. He is also University Professor and the Wallis Annenberg Chair in Communication Technology and Society at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Currently, Castells is a trustee of the California Institute of the Arts and is a member of the governing board of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT). Communication Power is the title of his latest research book in English, which has now been translated into Spanish and Catalan. On the event of this recent publication, we had the opportunity to speak to this communications expert.

[10/12/2009]

Interview with Jonathan Aronson

“What we have to do with information is learn how to control it”

An expert in communication, globalisation and international trade policies, Jonathan Aronson is one of the visiting professors welcomed by the UOC. We spoke to this professor from the University of Southern California, taking advantage of his time in Barcelona, where he gave a seminar on global information and communication markets.

[17/11/2009]

Interview with Ian Macduff

“Internet is a fundamental tool for conflict resolution”

The new Master's degree on Conflict Resolution, given in English at the UOC, includes among its professors the New Zealander Ian Macduff, a reputable mediator with teaching experience in Oceania, Asia and Europe. Macduff, currently a professor at the Singapore Management University, was a pioneer in his country in applying mediation in contexts such as business and environmental matters. He has worked as mediator with Maori tribes and on reconstruction programmes for the World Health Organisation. Some of these experiences were threshed out in a master conference held during the 3rd International Congress on Conflict, Conflict Resolution and Peace, organised last week by UOC's Campus for Peace.

[30/10/2009]

Interview with Alfonso S. Suárez

“Dubbing will never disappear. It was born with the talkies and if it dies, it will die with them”

Alfonso S. Suárez is producer and director of the documentary “Voces en imágenes” [Voices in Images], a very complete feature-length film that pays tribute to Spanish dubbing. Besides being a screenwriter, Suárez produces ads for film and television and videoclips and documentaries. He has worked as television scheduling and contents director and teacher of advertising and film directing. His work has earned him over 40 national and international awards. The UOC was fortunate enough to count on his participation and that of dubbing actors Lorenzo Beteta (voice of Mulder on The X Files) and Eduardo Gutiérrez (director of dubbing on Harry Potter) at September's Noche en Blanco in Madrid.

[26/10/2009]

Interview with V.K. Menon

“Knowledge workers are the drivers of the economy”

India is the most populous democracy in the world and has become a land of opportunities for entrepreneurs. The UOC, in collaboration with Casa Asia, invited Professor V.K Menon, Senior Director of the prestigious Indian School of Business (ISB) in Hyderabad, to explain the causes of India’s economic success and its particular cultural features. The UOC’s International Graduate Institute offers an international business programme focusing on doing business in India.

[02/10/2009]

Interview with Paul Fleming

“When there is a critical mass of users, virtual worlds will become integrated in companies”

Paul Fleming has been running the Barcelona Virtual advertising agency ever since it was founded in 1995. His company was a pioneer in Spain in opening virtual offices in Second Life, a platform that he feels is key to the commercial future of many companies and for distance learning. He has recently taken part in the Ninth UOC Innovation Forum, where at an event held precisely in Second Life, he set out his commitment to virtual worlds for promotion, cost reduction, improving business and university communication and opening up new ways of business.

[31/08/2009]

Interview with Ricard Espelt

"There's a thin line between data confidentiality and transparency"

Ricard Espelt is the Councillor for Economic Development and New Technologies in the Town Council of Copons (Anoia) and also the person behind the Copons 2.0 project. This initiative represents a new way of understanding and approaching politics, as it uses social networks to bring council governance closer to the people. At the Internet Law and Politics Conference organized by the UOC last June, Espelt stated that «the Internet is a new political arena that is reinventing democracy».

[27/08/2009]

Interview with Josh Hester

“Each person has a huge responsibility to the future of our environment”

Josh Hester is a Civil and Environmental Engineering student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The UOC, as a host institution for the MIT-Spain programme, has welcomed Hester into its Distributed, Parallel and Collaborative Systems research group at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3). Group researcher and lecturer in the UOC’s IT, Multimedia and Telecommunications department, Àngel A. Juan, has acted as his mentor during his stay at the University over the months of June and July. Hester, as well as taking part in DPCS group projects, also gave a research seminar on energy efficiency at the IN3 in July.

[29/07/2009]

Interview with Robert Castel

“Today we feel that we've lost control over our social future”

Sociologist and Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, Robert Castel has the sufficient track record, experience and age to have seen it all before. Yet, when you listen to this lecturer and doctor of Arts speak, you discover that those people who live 'what they do and they believe' never stop being active. A specialist in subjects relating to wages, unemployment, tolerance and social transformations, he knows that today his voice needs to be heard more than ever: in times of crisis and uncertainty, we cannot drop our guard if we don't want to lose our social protection laws and rights, won collectively in the early days of the industrial revolution. If we do, as Thomas Hobbs proclaimed centuries ago, the future looks bleak.

[01/07/2009]

Interview with William H. Meyers

“In an ideal world, countries would not restrict the flow of food”

If one word could describe the profound changes of globalisation it would be complexity. Many different elements are involved and interact in the global production and distribution of goods. In the case of food, this goes from the intricate genetics of seeds to the enormous differences in legal frameworks and regulations that the food goes through before it arrives at its destination. Occasionally, an outbreak, like swine flu, highlights blind spots in this system, but most of the time they remain hidden to most people. The experienced William H. Meyers works at the Food and Agriculture Policy Research Institute (FAPRI) in Missouri, USA, to bring this tangled network to light. Meyers is a member of the International Academic Advisory Committee to the UOC’s new Food Systems, Culture and Society Area and author of the UOC course Agri-food Policy, Food Safety and International Trade.

[08/06/2009]

Interview with David Laitin

“Multilingualism is not associated with low economic growth”

Game theory emerged during the Cold War to explain why cooperation between enemies is often the best option to avoid a greater menace. Professor David Laitin adapted Nobel award winner Thomas Schelling’s theory to linguistic conflicts and nationalisation movements. Laitin is Professor of Political Science at Stanford University, USA. He was invited by the Linguamón-UOC Chair in Multilingualism to showcase the results from his latest empirical research into the situation in Catalonia.

[08/05/2009]

Interview with Mustapha Chèrif

“Civilisations can’t thrive without sharing and exchanging”

From October onwards, Mustapha Cherif will be in charge of the new master’s degree in Arabic and Islamic Studies at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. In autumn of 2006, Cherif gave the inaugural lesson for the academic year 2006-2007 at the UOC and, a few weeks later, was given a private audience with Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican, in the course of which the former Minister for Education for Algeria and current Professor of Philosophy at Algiers University spoke to the Pontiff of his conviction that Islam does not thrive on violence and intolerance, but on reason and dialogue. In this interview, this specialist in intercultural and interreligious dialogue spoke of the need to create a new, common civilisation for the whole of humanity and referred to the “exceptional” opportunity that, in his opinion, Obama’s election as president of the United States represents.

[22/04/2009]

Interview with John Edwards

“We are all translators, all of the time”

Knowledge of one’s traditional language – whether Catalan, Gaelic, Ukrainian or any other – is not required in order to identify with that particular culture. Where the original language persists, however, it is obviously a cultural bulwark. It is the relationship between language and group identity that Dr. John Edwards, from St Francis Xavier University (Nova Scotia, Canada), professor of psychology, focuses his research upon. His field has shifted from psycho-linguistics (specifically, looking at how children learn languages) to something called the sociology of language, which looks at language as a marker of some aspect of individual or group identity – how people and groups define themselves in terms of language. Dr. Edwards is to attend a seminar on multilingualism at the UOC in October.

[15/04/2009]

Interview with Kumiko Aoki

“There's no need to memorise facts, just the skill to gather information”

Kumiko Aoki has lived in the United States for 17 years, obtaining her Master’s Degree in Communication at the University of Winsconsin and her Ph.D in Communication and Information Sciences from the University of Hawaii. From 1995 to 1998 Aoki was Assistant Professor at Rochester Institute of Technology in New York and Assistant Professor at Boston University from 1998 to 2003, after which she went back to Japan to take up her current position in the National Institute of Multimedia Education, a quasi-governmental research organization to research and promote e-learning in higher education.

[23/03/2009]

Interview with Julio Carabaña

“Educators must consider students as individuals”

Julio Carabaña is a professor of sociology who wears many different hats, putting them on and removing them several times in a single conversation: applied sociologist, teacher, expert in education, analyst of the Pisa 2006 Report, researcher with an ability to surprise… But listening to him, what is most remarkable about him is his common sense. In his thought-provoking observations he moves with ease between percentages and statistics, rounding off with comments on some of the ‘urban myths’ surrounding immigration and the classroom. These ‘others’, meaning immigrant students, are neither so many nor so different, they do not slow down the learning of their native-born classmates and they are not to blame for all the problems of the classroom. What's more, for Carabaña, the Spanish and Catalan education systems have nothing to envy about the rest: they are among the best. Spanish schools know very well how to deal with the 10% of their pupils who come from abroad; what’s more they are equipped to do so. The situation is positive.

[17/03/2009]

Interview with Begoña Gros

“I imagine the university of the future as being much more open and flexible”

The Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Open University of Catalonia, UOC) is co-organising the 8th Expoelearning conference, the e-learning trade show to be held at Barcelona’s Palau de Congressos on 19 and 20 March. Over the two days, the Catalan city is to become the world capital of e-learning. The UOC Vice President for Innovation, Begoña Gros, is to chair the conference.

[11/02/2009]

Interview with Cinzia Scaffidi

“All human beings have a right to eat, not just to feed themselves”

Eating is essential to live. We all know that. However, many of us have forgotten that it’s not just for physical survival. Eating is an essential act to enjoy, to learn, to defend our cultures and to preserve our environment. In our societies voices are being heard such as that of Cinzia Scaffidi and her colleagues in the Slow Food non-profit organisation, which has been reminding us since the 1980s of everything that our grandparents already knew. Their message is simple and even obvious but we’ve forgotten it: the food that we eat has to be good, clean and fair. But not just that, they also remind us of the right to feed ourselves and to do so in the way we want. This right belongs to every single human being, be they rich or poor.

[27/01/2009]

Interview with Jeremy Evas

“Using their language shouldn’t cost the user a thing”

Jeremy Evas is a doctor in language planning theory. He has been head of language research and technologies of the Welsh language Board since 2003. Evas is also the author of a number of publications on the role of new technologies in promoting minoritised languages and on bilingualism in Wales. His fields of research include second language acquisition, and it is possibly for this reason that he speaks, masters or understands English, Welsh, French, Spanish, Breton, Catalan, Italian, German and Galician. He appeared at a conference organised by the Linguamón-UOC Chair in Multilingualism.

[20/01/2009]

Interview with Brian Lamb

“The future is going to happen. The question is if we will have an influence on it”

Brian Lamb is a Project Coordinator with the Office of Learning Technology at the University of British Columbia (UBC) where he manages and consults on reusable media, personal publishing and social software initiatives on campus. However, he prefers to call himself a “discoordinator” because the technologies that interest him the most tend to be the ones that are fast, cheap and out of control. Given that he likes transgressive and non-mainstream ideas, he enjoys new media that offers the possibility to hear voices that we wouldn’t have heard a few years ago. This is why he named his blog “Abject Learning”.

[18/12/2008]

Interview with Teemu Leinonen

“If there is free knowledge available on the Web, it will make more sense for governments to invest in connectivity”

Teemu Leinonen is a member of the WikiMedia Foundation's Advisory Board. He also leads the Learning Environments research group at the Helsinki Art and Design University Media Lab, where he has developed the Fle3 learning environment, LeMill (a community aimed at managing open education resources) and MobilED, an audio platform based on wiki tools for mobile communities. He visited Barcelona last November to present the Wikiversity at the UOC UNESCO Chair in E-Learning Fifth International Seminar: Fighting the digital divide through education.

[15/12/2008]

Interview with Alberto Duran

“It's easy to build walls in the Internet”

Alberto Durán López was born in El Ferrol, A Coruña, 37 years ago, with a severe visual defect. With a Degree in Law from the University of Navarra and a Masters in Economics and Business Management from IESE Business School, he is currently President of the Fundosa Group and First Executive Vice President of the ONCE Foundation. He is also a member of the Corporate Social Responsibility Think Tank created by the Spanish Ministry of Labour and Social Welfare. Alberto Durán was the guest of honour at the 2008 Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Open University of Catalonia,UOC) graduation ceremony held in Madrid on Saturday November 29.

[02/12/2008]

Interview with Martin Langhoff

“One Laptop per Child has already distributed nearly a million laptops in 31 countries”

The “One Laptop per Child” computers are designed for working, as the people responsible for them say, “under a tree”. That is, networked and forming a learning community. For this to happen, the best way is to have a server which connects them to the internet (where possible), provides content, offers them a virtual learning environment like Moodle, or saves backup copies. Martin Langhoff is the “School Server Architect” for this project. In other words, he is the one responsible for making sure that any server, in any school, anywhere in the world is capable of automatic self-configuration to provide service to a community of students and teachers. The numbers from just one of the countries – Peru – give some idea of the extent of his job: 5,000 servers providing service to the 240,000 laptops which are already on their way.

[19/11/2008]

Interview with Martin Dougiamas

“Learning is better when it is collaborative, and that drives Moodle development”

With two and a half million courses and more than twenty-five million users, there is no doubt that Moodle is the most popular Course Management System in the world. Free and open source, it is a way for teachers to create a space where students and teachers themselves can collaborate in learning activities. Martin Dougiamas, the computer scientist and educator who started it in 1999, came to Barcelona to participate in Moodlemoot 08, Spain’s fifth Moodle user meeting, which was co-organized and sponsored by the UOC.

[07/10/2008]

Interview with Norbert Pachler

“Our students play a very significant role in knowledge generation”

The Institute of Education in London is one of the leading faculties of education in the world. Among other areas, the Institute specialises in initial teacher education. It has a wide-ranging portfolio of research in education and social sciences, and undertakes all manner of projects and consultancy activities. Dr Norbert Pachler has helped the centre to design a Master course based on lifelong learning which tries to build a community of knowledge, involving not only education research, but also daily work. Dr Pachler has come to Spain to attend the EUNoM Seminar. The UOC is a member of EUNoM, the European Universities Network on Multilingualism.

[01/09/2008]

Interview with Carlos Reis

“The UOC has a direct relation with the reality of Catalonia”

Carlos Reis, President of the Universidad Aberta de Portugal (Open University of Portugal) visited the UOC to draw inspiration from its pedagogical model and thus lead the technological change imposed by modern times in his institution. At the head of this long-established open university, Reis reveals to us its forthcoming projects in the international framework and analyzes how our neighboring country is dealing with the challenges of the Bologna Process.

[01/08/2008]

Interview with Richard Stallman

“Using proprietary software is renouncing freedom”

Richard Stallman's crusade began one day at the end of the 1970s when he was working in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). RMS, as he likes to be called, was trying to modify his printer to notify users when the documents would be ready, but he came up against an insurmountable obstacle: he couldn't access the source code, which was considered information owned by Xerox. Convinced that sharing knowledge is basic to the advancement of the community, he left MIT in 1984 to develop GNU, a free operating system used today by millions of computers, to set up the Free Software Movement and to fight against programming patents.

[14/07/2008]

Interview with Charlotte Gunawardena

“Online communities equalize differences between rich and poor”

Professor Charlotte (Lani) Gunawardena teaches in the College of Education at the University of New Mexico, USA. She has been a World Bank consultant in Sri Lanka, and has consulted in Brazil, Mexico, Norway, Turkey and China. Gunawardena has won several awards related to her research interests, which include social construction of knowledge in online thought communities, sociocultural context of online learning or cross-cultural communication and training. Now, Gunawardena has come to the UOC to show us how to build “wise” online communities.

[20/06/2008]

Interview with Gonzalo Bernardos

"We are faced with the longest and deepest property crisis in the history of Spain"

Bachelor’s and PhD in Economics and Business Sciences from the University of Barcelona, Gonzalo Bernardos is permanent professor at the UB and director of the Master’s in Property Consultancy at this university. In addition, he teaches Business Sciences in the Department of Economics and Business at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Open University of Catalonia, UOC), to which he has been linked since its inception. Expert in property economics, among many other subjects, this past January he published his most recent book: ¿Cómo invertir con éxito en el mercado inmobiliario? (How to Invest Successfully in the Property Market - Editorial Netbiblo).

[03/06/2008]

Interview with Jovan Divjak, former general of Bosnian army

“Nationalisms smother attempts to educate to prevent past mistakes”

Those who know him well stress that former general Divjak is one of the most charismatic men in Sarajevo. It is impossible to walk with him through the Bosnian capital without people constantly stopping him to greet him and thank him for his contribution to the city, during the Bosnian war. In the midst of the horror, he showed a great talent for mediation and brought a great deal of humanism to it. He now heads an organisation that awards grants to the orphans of this sad chapter in history. The UOC invited him to talk about how the post-war generation is building a new future from a divided society

[22/05/2008]

Interview with J. Antonio Gil

"In Mostar and Kosovo, civilians welcomed Spanish soldiers with relief"

José Antonio Gil, a soldier in the Spanish armed forces, did two tours of duty in areas in conflict in Europe. The first was in the Kosovo, where he spent six months in 2002. Later he was in the Bosnian city of Mostar, where he worked for five months in 2004. When he returned home, he decided that he wanted to learn more about conflicts and to understand their causes for future missions. He completed the UOC’s Masters in Conflict Resolution and says that he would do it again.

[05/05/2008]

Interview with Juan de Dios Ramírez-Heredia

“There aren't any Romany university presidents, but everything will come in time”

April sees the celebration of International Roma Day, a day that looks to commemorate the history, language and culture of a group that has suffered discrimination and social stigma for many centuries. One of the most famous faces in Spain standing up for the rights of the Romany is the President of Unión Romaní, Juan de Dios Ramírez-Heredia. He is well known, among other reasons, for being the first Romany member of the Spanish parliament and his thirteen years in the European parliament. In February 2004, this Romany graduate in Law from the UOC was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Cádiz for his outstanding career.

[22/04/2008]

Interview with Najat El Hachmi

“I've been very disappointed with traditional universities”

The young Moroccan-born Catalan writer Najat El Hachmi has been one of the most prominent faces in Catalan literature over recent weeks having won the Ramon Llull 2008 Award for her book L’últim patriarca (The Last Patriarch). In this work, she describes the conflict between a young girl being raised in inland Catalonia and a despotic father; a fictional story that many have seen as autobiographical.

El Hachmi took part in this year’s Anatomia, an event organised by Lletra, the UOC’s Catalan literature website, and the Catalan Letters Institute to take stock and look ahead at Catalan literature through the eyes of some of its leading lights.

[11/04/2008]

Interview with Barbara Grabowski

“The Internet is the best place for learning”

The International Board of Standards for Training, Performance and Instruction (IBSTPI) is a council that comprises renowned professionals from the teaching profession, private industry, the military sector and world governments. The current chairperson, Barbara Grabowki, explains how this non-profit making organisation conducts research and advises us on the competencies we need to have for different professions. These include online teaching.

[04/04/2008]

Interview with Jordi Moreras

“Europe is not a Christian club; in reality it is much more heterogeneous”

As part of the event organised at the UOC, the anthropologist Jordi Moreras offered a lecture on how to approach the Muslim identity in a European context. He assures us that it is very much a work in progress and that just as with Europe’s own identity, it is continually in transformation. It is a subject which can not be looked at from just one perspective and that generates a debate with more questions than answers.

[12/02/2008]

Interview with Martha Cleveland-Innes

“The UOC is very aware of the technological changes and how they need to be integrated into education”

Dr M. Cleveland-Innes is Associate Professor at the Centre for Distance Education at Athabasca University, Canada, and teaches on the Master of Distance Education Programme. She visited the UOC in January as a researcher rather than as a teacher. She is carrying out a study into leadership in open and distance learning universities and has spent over a month visiting institutions across Europe willing to answer questions like: Which leadership models are working in these institutions? Are they the same or different models as in other institutions? Do innovative educational systems like the UOC need innovative leadership styles?

[28/01/2008]

Interview with Vicent Partal

“In internet it's not the big that eat the small, it's the fast that eat the slow”

Technological changes also have a great impact on the media. New forms appear; older ones try to evolve and offer new services or may simply disappear. Broadband television (IPTV), videos, podcasts or wikis and blogs are technologies to which newspapers, radio, television and, above all, digital media, adapt themselves. Without losing our local vision, one of the media of reference in Catalan, Vilaweb, is also immersed in this dynamic of change. Vicent Partal is the director and one of its founders and is linked to the UOC in a number of ways, for example, as a member of the panel of judges of the Lletra Award and as a member of the University Foundation's Board of Trustees. (November 2007)

[15/01/2008]

Interview with Vijay Kumar

“You have to show a compelling reason why you are bringing in the innovation”

As Director of the Office of Educational Innovation and Technology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Dr Vijay Kumar is MIT's leader in new technologies for learning, a position that undoubtedly makes him a world guru in the field. Dr Kumar is also honorary advisor to India's National Knowledge Commission, where he has been engaged in advancing open and technology enabled initiatives for educational access and quality. He was one of the guest speakers at the University Campus Conference, the conference held last October in Barcelona to discuss the Campus Project, an initiative of Catalan universities to develop virtual campuses using free software.