La comunicación en la red de pacientes con enfermedades raras en España

Introducción: Este estudio se centra en la estrategia de comunicación de las organizaciones de pacientes con enfermedades raras en internet. Objetivo: Analizar la utilización de las herramientas de comunicación en internet. Métodos: Se examinaron 143 organizaciones de pacientes nacionales. Se ha realizado un análisis de contenido de cada una de las webs de las organizaciones, redes sociales y blogs. Y se han llevado a cabo encuestas telefónicas a 90 organizaciones con las que se contactó, el 63% del total. Resultados: El 84% de las web está gestionada por miembros de las organizaciones sin formación específica y el 16% por profesionales. Se dirigen en la misma proporción a pacientes y allegados que al resto de la población, pero no utilizan herramientas que les permitan una comunicación más fluida. Discusión y Conclusiones: Los resultados muestran la necesidad de contar con personal especializado y con espacios habilitados en la red para comunicarse con el resto de la población.

La gastronomía como Industria Creativa en un contexto digital. Análisis de webs y redes sociales de los restaurantes españoles con estrella Michelin

En los últimos años es evidente el éxito creciente de la gastronomía, no sólo como mercado económico sino también desde una perspectiva comunicativa. Entendida como una Industria Creativa, la gastronomía está adquiriendo cada vez más peso en el mercado de la comunicación y se están desarrollando planes estratégicos que acercan progresivamente el sector gastronómico a todos los públicos, democratizando el arte de la cocina y haciendo de éste un talento accesible y disponible para todos los públicos. En pleno contexto de crecimiento, las estrategias y recursos comunicativos que utilizan tanto los mass media como los propios restaurantes y profesionales de la cocina, se han de convertir en objeto de estudio necesario para entender, por ejemplo, de qué manera se explotan los recursos comunicacionales y cuál es el alcance de los mismos así como sus oportunidades. El presente artículo se centra en un análisis de contenido de las páginas webs y las redes sociales utilizadas por los ocho restaurantes españoles galardonados con tres estrellas por la Guía Michelin España-Portugal (2014), sometidos a estudio en la misma semana (del 15 al 21 de septiembre). El objetivo principal es tratar de conocer estrategia de comunicación online llevada a cabo por estos restaurantes y establecer la importancia que se les atribuye a los recursos web a la hora de contribuir tanto a la consolidación de sus propias marcas como a la propia Industria Creativa gastronómica. Los resultados muestran cierta disparidad en el uso tanto de los recursos web como de los social media y avanzan que el sector gastronómico y de la restauración española tiene un reto: seguir comunicando implicándose en mayor medida con la bidireccionalidad e invitación a la participación de sus públicos, con el objetivo de captar nuevos contactos, fidelizar a los clientes actuales y convertir a todos ellos en prescriptores de sus servicios.

Evaluation of online tools as didactic resource in the university education

Recently, many efforts have been made in the academic world to adapt the new degrees to the new European Higher Education Area (EHEA). New technologies have been the most important factor to carry out this adaptation. In particular, the tools 2.0 have been spreading quickly, not just the Web 2.0, but even in all the educational levels. Nevertheless, it is now necessary to evaluate whether all these efforts and all the changes, carried out in order to obtain improved academic performance among students, have provided good results. Therefore, the aim of this paper is focused on studying the impact of the implementation of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in a subject belonging to a Master from the University of Alicante in the academic year (2010-2011). In special, it is an elective course called "Advanced Visual Ergonomics" from the Master of Clinical Optometry and Vision. The methodology used to teach this course differs from the traditional one in many respects. For example, one of the resources used for the development of this course is a blog developed specifically to coordinate a series of virtual works, whose purpose is that the student goes into specific aspects of the current topic. Next, the student participates in an active role by writing a personal assessment on the blog. However, in the course planning, there is an attendance to lessons, where the teacher presents certain issues in a more traditional way, that is, with a lecture supported with audiovisual materials, such as materials generated in powerpoint. To evaluate the quality of the results achieved with this methodology, in this work the personal assessment of the students, who have completed this course during this academic year, are collected. In particular, we want to know their opinion about the used resources, as well as the followed methodology. The tool used to collect this information was a questionnaire. This questionnaire evaluates different aspects of the course: a general opinion, quality of the received information, satisfaction about the followed methodology and the student´s critical awareness. The design of this questionnaire is very important to get conclusive information about the methodology followed in the course. The questionnaire has to have an adequate number of questions; whether it has many questions, it might be boring for the student who would pay no enough attention. The questions should be well-written, with a clear structure and message, to avoid confusion and an ambiguity. The questions should be objectives, without any suggestion for a desired answer. In addition, the questionnaire should be interesting to encourage the student´ s interest. In conclusion, this questionnaire developed for this subject provided good information to evaluate whether the methodology was a useful tool to teach "Advanced Visual Ergonomics". Furthermore, the student´s opinion collected by this questionnaire might be very helpful to improve this didactic resource.

Assessing participation in online discussion forums: a proposal for multidimensional analysis

This paper aims to assess the discussion forums being used in the programme Especialista Universitario online sobre Tecnologías de la Información y la Comunicación, taught at the University of Alicante, on the basis of the analysis model suggested by Kay (2004). In such a model, it is essential to represent graphically the forum activity so that the visual representation may improve analysis. This research has allowed reaching results which define the forum activity and has contributed with a proposal for multi analysis in the area of assessing participation in communication within online discussion forums.

Los medios online y la ¿crisis? de la planificación de medios publicitarios

Los medios online representan actualmente una gran apuesta para la publicidad. Desde la planificación de medios publicitarios, los nuevos medios ofrecen otros caminos para llegar al público, pero añaden mayor complejidad. La capacidad comunicativa de los medios online y el mayor consumo de esos medios por parte de la población abre el debate de la necesidad de replantear el enfoque de la planificación de medios, digamos, tradicional, cuya estructura y procesos de trabajo se desarrollaron cuando los medios eran offline. Así, este artículo proporciona una panorámica general de la influencia de los nuevos medios en la planificación. Para ello, en primer lugar, describe el escenario actual, analizando la penetración y las inversiones publicitarias en Internet. Además, expone los principales soportes online según su proximidad a la concepción de la planificación de medios offline. En segundo lugar, aborda los retos actuales en la medición de los nuevos medios como síntoma del impulso del cambio de modelo. Finalmente, el artículo termina exponiendo algunas tendencias que se presentan como motores de cambio. Sin embargo, tras este análisis se advierte que tales aspectos no modificarían la esencia de la planificación de medios, por lo que cabe cuestionarse si se puede hablar de crisis, o si los nuevos medios están mostrando la necesidad de que la investigación y planificación se comprometa con este nuevo escenario.

ConfChem Conference on A Virtual Colloquium to Sustain and Celebrate IYC 2011 Initiatives in Global Chemical Education—The Global Experiment of the IYC2011: Creating Online Communities for Education and Science

The Global Experiment, Water: A Chemical Solution, was one of the flagship activities of the International Year of Chemistry (IYC). During the virtual colloquium of the spring 2012 online ConfChem conference, the main results of this year-long experiment were presented and discussed online for a week. Some of the main conclusions of the virtual conversations relate to the benefits of creating online communities of people sharing similar interests, the use of online educational platforms to gather massive amounts of data, and specific questions about the development of this IYC initiative. The activities of the global water experiment (GWE) were designed by a team of experts and the protocols are available online on the GWE Web site. The results were shown in one interactive world map that allowed students to learn about data visualization, validation, and interpretation. The feedback obtained from the participants of the GWE and later by the contributors of the virtual colloquium was very positive. Many participants asked specific and technical questions about the development of this experiment, while others excitedly endorsed the convenience of these large open-access activities to promote chemistry worldwide. The estimate is that over 2 million people took part in the GWE during the IYC. This communication summarizes one of the invited papers to the ConfChem online conference: A Virtual Colloquium to Sustain and Celebrate IYC 2011 Initiatives in Global Chemical Education, held from May 18 to June 29, 2012 and hosted by the ACS DivCHED Committee on Computers in Chemical Education and the IUPAC Committee on Chemistry Education.

Structures, Systems and Organizational Communication Processes in Franchises in times of crisis: the Spanish case

Current economic crisis together with the Internet revolution has had direct impacts on the franchise sector of Spain: in particular on its unique communication network. The aim of this research is to analyse how Spanish franchise companies have adapted to these changes through its corporate communications management. We want to determine whether the management of communications is ideal to the growth and consolidation of companies in the market. Corporate communications plans and organizational structures were analyzed to verify whether or not information technology (i.e. the use of the Internet) is maximized: the communications aspect being a critical area of company growth. We found that most franchise companies surveyed had adapted well to the changes in information technology, despite economic challenges. The Internet as a communications tool has been limited to its utility as a “bulletin board” for information. The marketing advantage of Internet communication, or its use as an avenue for customer exchange and exchange of goods and services has yet to be maximized. Future research may look into the details of how companies are able to maximize the communications-marketing advantage that Online/Internet can contribute to the franchise sector.

Assessment of Web Content Accessibility Levels in Spanish Official Online Education Environments

Diversity-based designing, or the goal of ensuring that web-based information is accessible to as many diverse users as possible, has received growing international acceptance in recent years, with many countries introducing legislation to enforce it. This paper analyses web content accessibility levels in Spanish education portals according to the international guidelines established by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). Additionally, it suggests the calculation of an inaccessibility rate as a tool for measuring the degree of non-compliance with WAI Guidelines 2.0 as well as illustrating the significant gap that separates people with disabilities from digital education environments (with a 7.77% average). A total of twenty-one educational web portals with two different web depth levels (42 sampling units) were assessed for this purpose using the automated analysis tool Web Accessibility Test 2.0 (TAW, for its initials in Spanish). The present study reveals a general trend towards non-compliance with the technical accessibility recommendations issued by the W3C-WAI group (97.62% of the websites examined present mistakes in Level A conformance). Furthermore, despite the increasingly high number of legal and regulatory measures about accessibility, their practical application still remains unsatisfactory. A greater level of involvement must be assumed in order to raise awareness and enhance training efforts towards accessibility in the context of collective Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), since this represents not only a necessity but also an ethical, social, political and legal commitment to be assumed by society.

New Approaches for Teaching Soil and Rock Mechanics Using Information and Communication Technologies

Soil and rock mechanics are disciplines with a strong conceptual and methodological basis. Initially, when engineering students study these subjects, they have to understand new theoretical phenomena, which are explained through mathematical and/or physical laws (e.g. consolidation process, water flow through a porous media). In addition to the study of these phenomena, students have to learn how to carry out estimations of soil and rock parameters in laboratories according to standard tests. Nowadays, information and communication technologies (ICTs) provide a unique opportunity to improve the learning process of students studying the aforementioned subjects. In this paper, we describe our experience of the incorporation of ICTs into the classical teaching-learning process of soil and rock mechanics and explain in detail how we have successfully developed various initiatives which, in summary, are: (a) implementation of an online social networking and microblogging service (using Twitter) for gradually sending key concepts to students throughout the semester (gradual learning); (b) detailed online virtual laboratory tests for a delocalized development of lab practices (self-learning); (c) integration of different complementary learning resources (e.g. videos, free software, technical regulations, etc.) using an open webpage. The complementary use to the classical teaching-learning process of these ICT resources has been highly satisfactory for students, who have positively evaluated this new approach.

A Computational Model of the Belief System Under the Scope of Social Communication

This paper presents an approach to the belief system based on a computational framework in three levels: first, the logic level with the definition of binary local rules, second, the arithmetic level with the definition of recursive functions and finally the behavioural level with the definition of a recursive construction pattern. Social communication is achieved when different beliefs are expressed, modified, propagated and shared through social nets. This approach is useful to mimic the belief system because the defined functions provide different ways to process the same incoming information as well as a means to propagate it. Our model also provides a means to cross different beliefs so, any incoming information can be processed many times by the same or different functions as it occurs is social nets.

Online Media and Crisis? of Advertising Media Planning

Nowadays, online media represent a great choice for advertising. From de advertising media planning, new media give new ways to reach the consumers, but they also add more complexity. The communication capacity of online media and the greater use of that media by part of the users open up the debate about the necessity of rethinking the approach of the ‘traditional’ advertising media planning, which structure and work processes were developed when media were offline. So, this article gives a panoramic view about the influence of new media in advertising media planning. To do this, in first place, describes the current scenario, analyzing the penetration and advertising expenditure in Internet. Also, it shows the main online media according to their proximity to the offline advertising media planning conception. In second place, this article addresses the current challenges at measuring new media as a symptom of the impulse at the change of model. Finally, the article ends up showing some trends that are presented as drivers of change. However, after this analysis, comes up the point that those aspects would not change the essence of advertising media planning, so it is questionable if we can speak of a crisis or, instead, if new media are showing the necessity that media planning have to be involved with this new scenario.

‘Branded webseries’. Acciones estratégicas del anunciante basadas en la ficción ‘online’ corporativa y el ‘marketing’ de contenidos

Desde antaño, anunciantes y marcas se han adherido a los contenidos audiovisuales, televisivos y cinematográficos, a través del patrocinio de producción, emplazamiento publicitario y bartering. Se trata de una estrategia básicamente accesible a presupuestos prominentes. Pero los cambios en la comunicación y la democratización de la creación y difusión de contenidos han abierto esta táctica al resto de anunciantes cuyas partidas publicitarias tratan de unir valores de marca y entretenimiento a través de las branded webseries. Se presenta un estudio de carácter exploratorio sobre la creación, difusión, promoción, recepción y socialización de webseries, historias de marcas basadas en la ficción y en el uso de Internet. Desde la triangulación metodológica, se aborda el estudio del caso de Risi y las tres temporadas de la webserie ¿Por qué esperar? mediante las entrevistas en profundidad con sus creadores, el análisis descriptivo de estas, así como el análisis cuantitativo de la audiencia y sus interacciones. Los resultados comparativos permiten describir el uso de la creatividad, los personajes famosos afines al público objetivo y el efecto generado por este tipo de historias generadoras de engagement.

Estudio de caso de los sMOOC y su pedagogía en el contexto online

En un contexto dominado por las nuevas tecnologías, los MOOCs parecen posicionarse como una alternativa o complemento a la formación tradicional. Se observa sin embargo, que la metodología empleada por este tipo de cursos masivos, no difiere de la comúnmente utilizada en el aula. Este artículo evalúa y describe una nueva tipología de MOOC, denominada Social MOOC, la cual se presenta como disruptiva en cuanto a pedagogía se refiere. A través de la plataforma ECO Learning, se analiza de forma exhaustiva mediante un estudio de caso, la pedagogía empleada y el rol que asume el estudiante en el primer sMOOC llevado a cabo que tuvo lugar durante los meses de marzo y abril de 2015. Se concluye, que la pedagogía empleada en esta nueva versión social de los ya citados MOOC, es innovadora tanto dentro como fuera del contexto digital. Los estudiantes asumen un papel muy activo y la comunicación se torna de un carácter bidireccional entre el facilitador y los mismos.

Effects of message appeal and service type in CSR communication strategies

Studies highlight the importance of corporate social responsibility (CSR) for companies' stakeholders. Consumers, however, are often unaware of such initiatives. Understanding how to effectively communicate socially responsible initiatives is an important challenge for both researchers and managers, who invest considerable resources in CSR initiatives. This study examines consumers' responses to two types of CSR initiatives (environment-related and employee-based) using two types of message appeals (emotional and rational) across two service types (hedonic and utilitarian). Responses provide data on consumers' awareness of CSR initiatives, attitudes toward the company, perceived company uniqueness, emotional response, and attributions of company motives to engage in CSR activities. Rational appeals more effectively communicate environment-related CSR initiatives, whereas emotional appeals more effectively communicate employee-based CSR initiatives. Effects on consumers' attributions of company motives to engage in CSR are significant in both service types. Finally, rational message appeals affect consumers' CSR awareness and emotional responses in utilitarian service.

Communication strategies in civil movements: «Marea Blanca», «Marea Verde» and Telemadrid’s mobilization

This article analyses the importance of the communication strategies applied by three significant social movements: Telemadrid workers’ mobilization (Madrid’s public television), the «Marea Blanca» («White Tide»), which grouped up the healthcare professionals, and the «Marea Verde» («Green Tide»), which was done by teachers. These movements are a practical application of the «indignados» («outraged») movement and, following the 15-M steps, they improved these strategies in what refers to communication and mobilization. For this purpose, we carried out two investigations: twelve in-depth interviews with leading members of these social movements; and an online questionnaire passed to strategic planners who are the experts in communication strategies from the advertising agencies.