Semantic web technology to support learning about the semantic web

This paper describes ASPL, an Advanced Semantic Platform for Learning, designed using the Magpie framework with an aim to support students learning about the Semantic Web research area. We describe the evolution of ASPL and illustrate how we used the results from a formal evaluation of the initial system to re-design the user functionalities. The second version of ASPL semantically interprets the results provided by a non-semantic web mining tool and uses them to support various forms of semantics-assisted exploration, based on pedagogical strategies such as performing later reasoning steps and problem space filtering

Satellite-enabled interactive education: scenarios and systems architectures

There are specific sectors of the economy that can benefit from satellite-based tele-education. Areas, such as maritime and agriculture, share common needs for both broadband connectivity at remote geographical areas that cannot otherwise be covered, and for innovative content for tele-education purposes. Furthermore, each area has special requirements with regard to the type of content to be delivered. In this paper we propose a set of architectural designs and case scenarios that will realise such interactive end-to-end education systems based on satellite communications. Services requirements in this setting are also identified and discussed

Finding your way into an open online learning community

Making educational materials freely available on the web is not only a noble enterprise, but also fits the call of helping people to become lifelong learners; a call which gets louder and louder every day. The world is rapidly changing, requiring us to continuously update our knowledge and skills. A problem with this approach to lifelong learning is that the materials that are made available are often both incomplete and unsuitable for independent learning in an online setting. The OpenER (Open Educational Resources) project at the Open Universiteit Nederland makes more than 20 short courses, originally developed for independent-study, freely available from the website www.opener.ou.nl. For our research we start from an envisioned online learning environment now under development. We use backcasting to select research topics that form steps from the current to the ultimate situation. The two experiments we report on here are an extension to standard forum software and the use of student notes to annotate learning materials: two small steps towards our ultimate open learning environment

Collaboration in the Semantic Grid: a Basis for e-Learning

The CoAKTinG project aims to advance the state of the art in collaborative mediated spaces for the Semantic Grid. This paper presents an overview of the hypertext and knowledge based tools which have been deployed to augment existing collaborative environments, and the ontology which is used to exchange structure, promote enhanced process tracking, and aid navigation of resources before, after, and while a collaboration occurs. While the primary focus of the project has been supporting e-Science, this paper also explores the similarities and application of CoAKTinG technologies as part of a human-centred design approach to e-Learning

Technologies to enhance self-directed learning from hypertext

With the growing popularity of the World Wide Web, materials presented to learners in the form of hypertext have become a major instructional resource. Despite the potential of hypertext to facilitate access to learning materials, self-directed learning from hypertext is often associated with many concerns. Self-directed learners, due to their different viewpoints, may follow different navigation paths, and thus they will have different interactions with knowledge. Therefore, learners can end up being disoriented or cognitively-overloaded due to the potential gap between what they need and what actually exists on the Web. In addition, while a lot of research has gone into supporting the task of finding web resources, less attention has been paid to the task of supporting the interpretation of Web pages. The inability to interpret the content of pages leads learners to interrupt their current browsing activities to seek help from other human resources or explanatory learning materials. Such activity can weaken learner engagement and lower their motivation to learn. This thesis aims to promote self-directed learning from hypertext resources by proposing solutions to the above problems. It first presents Knowledge Puzzle, a tool that proposes a constructivist approach to learn from the Web. Its main contribution to Web-based learning is that self-directed learners will be able to adapt the path of instruction and the structure of hypertext to their way of thinking, regardless of how the Web content is delivered. This can effectively reduce the gap between what they need and what exists on the Web. SWLinker is another system proposed in this thesis with the aim of supporting the interpretation of Web pages using ontology based semantic annotation. It is an extension to the Internet Explorer Web browser that automatically creates a semantic layer of explanatory information and instructional guidance over Web pages. It also aims to break the conventional view of Web browsing as an individual activity by leveraging the notion of ontology-based collaborative browsing. Both of the tools presented in this thesis were evaluated by students within the context of particular learning tasks. The results show that they effectively fulfilled the intended goals by facilitating learning from hypertext without introducing high overheads in terms of usability or browsing efforts

Applications of semantic web technology to support learning content development

The Semantic Web is based on ontology technology – a knowledge representation framework – at its core to make meaning explicit and more accessible to automatic processing. We discuss the potential of this technology for the development of content for learning technology systems. We survey seven application types demonstrating different forms of applications of ontologies and the Semantic Web in the development of learning technology systems. Ontology technologies can assist developers, instructors, and learners to organise, personalise, and publish learning content and to discover, generate, and compose learning content. A conceptual content development and deployment architecture allows us to distinguish and locate the different applications and to dis-cuss and assess the potential of the underlying technologies

Automating content generation for large-scale virtual learning environments using semantic web services

The integration of semantic web services with three-dimensional virtual worlds offers many potential avenues for the creation of dynamic, content-rich environments which can be used to entertain, educate, and inform. One such avenue is the fusion of the large volumes of data from Wiki-based sources with virtual representations of historic locations, using semantics to filter and present data to users in effective and personalisable ways. This paper explores the potential for such integration, addressing challenges ranging from accurately transposing virtual world locales to semantically-linked real world data, to integrating diverse ranges of semantic information sources in a usercentric and seamless fashion. A demonstrated proof-of-concept, using the Rome Reborn model, a detailed 3D representation of Ancient Rome within the Aurelian Walls, shows several advantages that can be gained through the use of existing Wiki and semantic web services to rapidly and automatically annotate content, as well as demonstrating the increasing need for Wiki content to be represented in a semantically-rich form. Such an approach has applications in a range of different contexts, including education, training, and cultural heritage

Semantic learning webs

By 2020, microprocessors will likely be as cheap and plentiful as scrap paper,scattered by the millions into the environment, allowing us to place intelligent systems everywhere. This will change everything around us, including the nature of commerce, the wealth of nations, and the way we communicate, work, play, and live. This will give us smart homes, cars, TVs , jewellery, and money. We will speak to our appliances, and they will speak back. Scientists also expect the Internet will wire up the entire planet and evolve into a membrane consisting of millions of computer networks, creating an “intelligent planet.” The Internet will eventually become a “Magic Mirror” that appears in fairy tales, able to speak with the wisdom of the human race. Michio Kaku, Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the Twenty - First Century, 1998 If the semantic web needed a symbol, a good one to use would be a Navaho dream-catcher: a small web, lovingly hand-crafted, [easy] to look at, and rumored to catch dreams; but really more of a symbol than a reality. Pat Hayes, Catching the Dreams, 2002 Though it is almost impossible to envisage what the Web will be like by the end of the next decade, we can say with some certainty that it will have continued its seemingly unstoppable growth. Given the investment of time and money in the Semantic Web (Berners-Lee et al., 2001), we can also be sure that some form of semanticization will have taken place. This might be superficial - accomplished simply through the addition of loose forms of meta-data mark-up, or more principled – grounded in ontologies and formalised by means of emerging semantic web standards, such as RDF (Lassila and Swick, 1999) or OWL (Mc Guinness and van Harmelen, 2003). Whatever the case, the addition of semantic mark-up will make at least part of the Web more readily accessible to humans and their software agents and will facilitate agent interoperability. If current research is successful there will also be a plethora of e-learning platforms making use of a varied menu of reusable educational material or learning objects. For the learner, the semanticized Web will, in addition, offer rich seams of diverse learning resources over and above the course materials (or learning objects) specified by course designers. For instance, the annotation registries, which provide access to marked up resources, will enable more focussed, ontologically-guided (or semantic) search. This much is already in development. But we can go much further. Semantic technologies make it possible not only to reason about the Web as if it is one extended knowledge base but also to provide a range of additional educational semantic web services such as summarization, interpretation or sense-making, structure-visualization, and support for argumentation