Report from the last Organic.Lingua Greek user trial

Another user trial of the Organic.Lingua project took place a few days before the end of the project, on the 12th of February 2014, at the premises of the Agricultural University of Athens (AUA), kindly hosted by the Laboratory of Viticulture and organized by Agro-Know.

The audience consisted of approximately 15 people, mostly post-graduate students of AUA as well as faculty of the laboratory; participation was not easy for anyone wishing to participate, as the exam period was ongoing during these days. The approach followed was according to the guidelines developed by the Organic.Lingua project, consisting of a couple of introductory presentations and a hands-on session. More specifically, the trial started with a presentation titled "Green Open Educational Resources (OER) concept", which provided an introduction to the OER concept and examples on web portals and other sources of green OER. The presentation was followed by another one, titled "Agricultural education collections & repositories", which provided information on the concept of metadata and their importance, how they are created and used in the portals for retrieving educational resources etc.

Presenting the OER concept

After a short coffee break, the re-engineered Organic.Edunet Web portal was presented to the participants; starting with a brief flash-back on how it all started, its evolution and the current status through the improvements made in the context of the Organic.Lingua project. The demonstration focused on the multilinguality features of the project such as the multilingual user interface and the metadata automatic translation features. The users were invited to register and follow a pre-defined scenario for browsing through the portal and perform specific activities which tested the portal's feature. The next step was the participation in the online questionnaire which was used by the participants to provide their feedback.

Partial view of the participants

The last session of the workshop included a hands-on session on the use of the AgLR tool and the new visualization interfaces of the Organic.Edunet ontology, which is going to replace the previously available semantic browsing option of the Organic.Edunet Web portal. Due to the fact that not all participants had their laptops available during the workshop, the specific part had to take place in groups rendering the process more challenging. However, this allowed a more informal discussion to take place by the end of the workshop, which focused mainly on various aspects of the Organic.Edunet Web portal and the OER concept in general.

Overall it was a nice experience; a validation and dissemination event for the Organic.Lingua project and an opportunity for the participants to get to know about OER, web sources of OER and of course the Organic.Edunet Web portal. You can find additional photos from the event here.

Open invitation: Help us make the Organic.Edunet Web portal even better!

Do you speak Organic?

Are you a researcher, a student, a teacher or a practitioner in the agricultural domain? Are you interested in language technologies and translation innovations? Have you visited the re-designed Organic.Edunet Web portal with its new multilingual services? Check it out now and help us improve by providing your feedback!

Organic.Edunet is an international portal that has been serving the Organic and Sustainable Agriculture community since 2009, bridging together a network of learning repositories and providing its users (such as pupils & students, teachers, etc.) with a significant volume of relevant educational resources on Organic Agriculture (OA) and Agroecology (AE).

Under the scope of the Organic.Lingua Project, the portal was enhanced with new multilingual capabilities, offering automatic translations in 17 languages and more! As we are reaching the end of the project, we are proud to announce that the brand-new version of the portal is now LIVE and you are all invited to test it!

The Public Pilot Trial will take place between Saturday, the 1^st of February and Monday, the 10^th of February, 2014. A script on how to use the portal is available at http://wiki.organic-lingua.eu/Public_Open_Trial_Scenario

To help us improve, fill in a short evaluation questionnaire, which can be accessed here.

 Your contribution is highly appreciated, as we are constantly trying to develop the services offered to our users, in order to accommodate the needs and requirements of people involved in learning and teaching Organic Agriculture and relevant topics such as ecology, environment, aquaculture, water resources management, sustainability and other green topics.

Thank you for your participation!

The new Organic.Edunet Web portal is coming soon!

Well, it seems that the significantly revised version of the Organic.Edunet Web portal will be available in the next days, Anyone visiting the portal at http://www.organic-edunet.eu receives the following screen:

This leaves me anxious to see more!

I have a special connection with Organic.Edunet, as it was the first EU project that I was involved in (back in 2008, as a member of the AUA team) and my opportunity to join this amazing world of EU projects, working with metadata, digital collections/repositories, educational resources and training curricula, Web 2.0 tools etc. Now I am still involved in Organic.Edunet through my involvement in the Organic.Lingua project, which brings a lot of fresh stuff (both collections and new functionalities in the portal) to Organic.Edunet.

I have to admit that I have seen some mock-ups of the new portal, as well as a testing environment with the new interface, but there's nothing like the real thing! So let's wait for a couple of days before we see the revised version of the portal. :-)

Do you speak Organic?

A survey on language barriers faced by the users of the Organic.Edunet Web portal (and not only) has been launched today by the Agro-Know team of the Organic.Lingua project. This project that aims to identify multilinguality issues and provide software solutions on the Organic.Edunet Web portal.

The survey, along with a short introduction to the whole concept can be found here. All people involved in the field of organic agriculture, agroecology and green fields in general (such as teachers, students, tutors/educators etc.) are more than welcome to participate in this survey and provide their feedback which will allow the Organic.Lingua project to work on the issues identified and hopefully come up with usable solutions!

Organic.Edunet multilingual survey!

Dear Organic.Edunet user,

The Organic.Edunet roadmap includes a significant number of new features and upgrade of existing ones. The main goal is to enchance the overall user-experience, the effectiveness and efficiency of all the tools and services, while new content is being added and more repositories are introduced in the federation of the Organic.Edunet repositories.

In order to help us better recognize your needs, please click on the following link to participate in our survey regarding your multilingual requirements and expected new features.

http://goo.gl/Dq8vO

The survey should not take more than 10 minutes to complete and it's completely anonymous.

The Organic.Edunet Community