Ismael
Peña López

The R&D activities of researcher Ismael Peña-López focus on the study of public development policies, with especial regard to ICT and a multidisciplinary social sciences approach. His main research interests deal with the impact of ICT upon development. To do this, the focus in on: 1. Measuring the development of digital economies and the personal adoption of digital technologies (e-readiness and the digital divide). The subjects worked on include ICT for development (ICT4D), e-inclusion, e-skills, ICT in development cooperation, not-for-profit ICT (nptech) and online voluntary work. 2. Analysing the impact of ICT on development and its leading institutions. The focus is on what makes up the subjective choice and the effective choice (education, democracy, etc.) and on the objective choice (health, economy, etc.). In other words, everything related to empowerment and governance: 2.1. ICT and education: how the digitalisation of content and communications is transforming the way in which knowledge is transmitted and the institutions we have designed for this purpose. Some subject matters include e-learning, e-portfolios, personal learning environments (PLE), open education resources (OER), education 2.0, etc. 2.2. ICT and democracy: how the digitalisation of content and communications is transforming the way in which we take collective decisions and the institutions we have designed for this purpose. Some subject matters include e-government, open government and open data, electronic voting, ICT-driven social movements, politics 2.0, etc. He is a member of the UOC's i2TIC (Interdisciplinary ICT Research) R&D group.