UnibookSE: An innovative environment for life-long learning

This paper focuses on the application of social networking technologies - in particular Web 2.0 - in fulfilling the needs for senior citizens´ education, information provision and communication. Unibook is a flexible platform which has been recently designed and implemented to provide synchronous and asynchronous learning in a university environment, which has been customized in its “SE” version to cover the aforementioned needs. Unibook^SE provides online communication, including attendance of multimedia courses from different terminals (PCs, mobile phones, PDAs) with advanced features, to facilitate senior users. In this paper, the technical characteristics of Unibook^SE are presented. Furthermore, the technological and operational innovations are analyzed, as well as potential extensions and improvements.