Daniel Alberto Giulianelli

Measurement framework for evaluating e-governance on municipalities websites

This paper presents a measurement framework for evaluating the design, content and services offered to citizens by municipal web sites. The proposed framework comprises 152 metrics enabling to analyze web sites by calculating through a single numerical value the level of e-Governance reached by each site. To perform this analysis a sample of municipal sites is considered, consisting on the capital cities of 31 countries spread over different continents. The results are compared and analyzed, allowing countries categorization according to their approach to e-Governance.

Reducing Digital Divide: adult oriented distance learning

The present paper shows the digital divide that exists among the communities that use ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies) in their everyday lives, including access to local government web sites, and those that have total ignorance of the subject. A survey regarding information technology knowledge was performed in several communities with very different sociocultural characteristics. The results of the survey, from a technological scope, show the width of the technologic gap that separates those communities. Being aware of this digital divide, this research shows the results of the implementation of a strategy that allows deprived citizens, who live in the border zones, to reach information technology knowledge. This strategy includes face learning, distance learning, the use of massive communication media, practice in national universitys computer labs and, theory and practice exams.

Encouraging students participation in the classroom by taking advance of mobile devices and Ad Hoc networks

The present article shows a strategy to incorporate mobile devices as a didactic resource inside a university class. This is founded in the important insertion of mobile phones together with other technological devices such as tablets, laptops etc. At the technological side, building an Ad Hoc network will allow sharing resources in the class without depending on the availability of an existing network infrastructure in all classrooms.

Modeling Parallel Applications on Mobile Devices

Nowadays more and more users have mobile devices with high computing power. This fact allows taking advantage of that processing power to design applications that allow users to interact remotely with the system simply using, for example, their cell phones. This requires having a modeling tool that allows incorporating the concepts of mobile computing and their particular domain characteristics. This work shows an extension to the UML profile called PROCODI (Concurrent and Distributed Processes), which adds the possibility of incorporating mobile devices as nodes within the model. This fact allows a quick visualization using a single diagram, of structural and behavioral aspects of the system, also including, now, mobile devices with their peculiarities.

Improving user experience by taking advance of semantic information of microformats on municipal websites

This research regards about the use of microformats as a tool to add semantic information to government web sites. The use of microformats allows the developer to add different resources such as maps, calendars, etc, in an easy way. The paper also shows a survey of the already existing microformats and which of them are useful to be applied to government web sites.

Building didactic applications for the teaching of practical content in a virtual campus

Distance teaching becomes a tough task when its goal is to explain topics with high practical contents because it is necessary for the student to have the teachers guidance in order to understand the steps and method to solve a particular problem. On the other hand, theoretical contents adapt themselves more easily to this methodology by the use of tools such as text with hyperlinks, synoptic charts, etc. This paper demonstrates a solution that facilitates the virtual teaching of practical contents by the use of multimedia material specially designed to fulfill this task. This material not only allows the student to learn the practical contents, but also provides him with an overview method and several ways of automatically checking his knowledge and comprehension of content.