Semi-Automated Creation of Converged iTV Services: From Macromedia Director Simulations to Services Ready for Broadcast

While sound and video may capture viewers' attention, interaction can captivate them. This has not been available prior to the advent of Digital Television. In fact, what lies at the heart of the Digital Television revolution is this new type of interactive content, offered in the form of interactive Television (iTV) services. On top of that, the new world of converged networks has created a demand for a new type of converged services on a range of mobile terminals (Tablet PCs, PDAs and mobile phones). This paper aims at presenting a new approach to service creation that allows for the semi-automatic translation of simulations and rapid prototypes created in the accessible desktop multimedia authoring package Macromedia Director into services ready for broadcast. This is achieved by a series of tools that de-skill and speed-up the process of creating digital TV user interfaces (UI) and applications for mobile terminals. The benefits of rapid prototyping are essential for the production of these new types of services, and are therefore discussed in the first section of this paper. In the following sections, an overview of the operation of content, service, creation and management sub-systems is presented, which illustrates why these tools compose an important and integral part of a system responsible of creating, delivering and managing converged broadcast and telecommunications services. The next section examines a number of metadata languages candidates for describing the iTV services user interface and the schema language adopted in this project. A detailed description of the operation of the two tools is provided to offer an insight of how they can be used to de-skill and speed-up the process of creating digital TV user interfaces and applications for mobile terminals. Finally, representative broadcast oriented and telecommunication oriented converged service components are also introduced, demonstrating how these tools have been used to generate different types of services.

Rollout of CampusContent

CampusContent (CC) is a DFG-funded competence center for eLearning with its own portal. It links content and people who support sharing and reuse of high quality learning materials and codified pedagogical know-how, such as learning objectives, pedagogical scenarios, recommended learning activities, and learning paths. The heart of the portal is a distributed repository whose contents are linked to various other CampusContent portals. Integrated into each portal are user-friendly tools for designing reusable learning content, exercises, and templates for learning units and courses. Specialized authoring tools permit the configuration, adaption, and automatic generation of interactive Flash animations using Adobe's Flexbuilder technology. More coarse-grained content components such as complete learning units and entire courses, in which contents and materials taken from the repository are embedded, can be created with XML-based authoring tools. Open service interface allow the deep or shallow integration of the portal provider's preferred authoring and learning tools. The portal is built on top of the Enterprise Content Management System Alfresco, which comes with social networking functionality that has been adapted to accommmodate collaboration, sharing and reuse within trusted communities of practice.

Herman D. Stein

Herman Stein, President of the International Association of Schools of Social Work from 1968 - 1976, has for more than sixty years excelled as an educator, scholar, internationalist, university administrator, and leader in a variety of professional associations. From almost the beginning of his career, the world has been the stage on which he has played those many roles, all of them with an abundance of talent. In fact, while he was in the graduate program of what is now the Columbia University School of Social Work, he had to decide whether to become a social worker or an actor. As an undergraduate he became involved in student theatrical productions, where he teamed up with the famous comedian, Danny Kaye, who became a life-long companion and friend. At the end of Steins first year in the social work program, he was invited to join an off-Broadway variety show that helped to launch Kaye on his meteoric rise on both stage and screen. "If I´d joined," Stein has said, "the theater probably was going to be where I would make my career as a character actor." Fortunately for social work and social work education, he chose instead to continue his studies at the School of Social Work, from which he received his master's degree in 1941 and the doctoral degree in 1958. While the world has been his stage, education has been at the heart of his manifold activities. Following a period of direct service practice as a caseworker in a well-known private agency in New York City, he was recruited by the Columbia School of Social Work in 1945 as a faculty member. With an interruption for a significant overseas assignment from 1947 to 1950, he continued at Columbia for another fourteen years, rising through all professorial ranks to Professor and Director of the School's Research Center.

Beyond the Margins: Analyzing Social Exclusion with a Homeless Client Dataset

A great share of literature on social exclusion has been based mainly on the analysis of official survey data. Whereas these efforts have provided insights into the characteristics and conditions of those people living at the margins of mainstream social relations, they have however failed to encompass those who live beyond these very margins. Meanwhile, research on these hidden subpopulations, such as homeless and other vulnerable groups, remains generally less abundant and is significantly detached from the theoretical core of the debate on social exclusion. The concern about these shortcomings lies at the heart of our research. We seek to bring some light to the area by using data made available by an organization that provides services to people experiencing homelessness in Barcelona (Spain). The data sample contains clients in early stages of exclusion and others in chronic situations. Thus, we attempt to identify some of the variables that operate in preventing the "chronification" of those individuals in situation of social exclusion. Our findings suggest that certain variables such as educational level, income and housing type, which are considered to be central predictors in the analysis of poverty, behave differently when analyzing differences between stages of social exclusion. Although these results cannot be extrapolated to the whole Spanish or European reality, they could provide useful insight for future investigations on this topic.