Building multi-layer social knowledge maps with google maps API

Google Maps is an intuitive online-map service which changes people's way of navigation on Geo-maps. People can explore the maps in a multi-layer fashion in order to avoid information overloading. This paper reports an innovative approach to extend the "power" of Google Maps to adaptive learning. We have designed and implemented a navigator for multi-layer social knowledge maps, namely ProgressiveZoom, with Google Maps API. In our demonstration, the knowledge maps are built from the Interactive System Design (ISD) course at the School of Information Science, University of Pittsburgh. Students can read the textbooks and reflect their individual and social learning progress in a context of pedagogical hierarchical structure

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

Semantic browsing of digital collections

Visiting museums is an increasingly popular pastime. Studies have shown that visitors can draw on their museum experience, long after their visit, to learn new things in practical situations. Rather than viewing a visit as a single learning event, we are interested in ways of extending the experience to allow visitors to access online resources tailored to their interests. Museums typically have extensive archives that can be made available online, the challenge is to match these resources to the visitor’s interests and present them in a manner that facilitates exploration and engages the visitor. We propose the use of knowledge level resource descriptions to identify relevant resources and create structured presentations. A system that embodies this approach, which is in use in a UK museum, is presented and the applicability of the approach to the broader semantic web is discussed

One Approach to Knowledge Mapping for International Student Portal

* The work is partly supported by RFFI grant 08-07-00062-aKnowledge portal is an approach used to provide view of domain-specific information on the World Wide Web [13]. In this paper, we present one approach by using ontology engineering as a conceptual backbone and relationships for knowledge extracting, structuring and formalizing as a comprehensive way for building knowledge portal. For illustration of a practical ontology development of knowledge portal, the described ideas are implemented in a system design for international student service

Evaluating the development of wearable devices, personal data assistants and the use of other mobile devices in further and higher education institutions

This report presents technical evaluation and case studies of the use of wearable and mobile computing mobile devices in further and higher education. The first section provides technical evaluation of the current state of the art in wearable and mobile technologies and reviews several innovative wearable products that have been developed in recent years. The second section examines three scenarios for further and higher education where wearable and mobile devices are currently being used. The three scenarios include: (i) the delivery of lectures over mobile devices, (ii) the augmentation of the physical campus with a virtual and mobile component, and (iii) the use of PDAs and mobile devices in field studies. The first scenario explores the use of web lectures including an evaluation of IBM's Web Lecture Services and 3Com's learning assistant. The second scenario explores models for a campus without walls evaluating the Handsprings to Learning projects at East Carolina University and ActiveCampus at the University of California San Diego . The third scenario explores the use of wearable and mobile devices for field trips examining San Francisco Exploratorium's tool for capturing museum visits and the Cybertracker field computer. The third section of the report explores the uses and purposes for wearable and mobile devices in tertiary education, identifying key trends and issues to be considered when piloting the use of these devices in educational contexts

Adaptive Information Visualization for Personalized Access to Educational Digital Libraries

Personalization is one of the emerging ways to increase the power of modern Digital Libraries. The Knowledge Sea II system presented in this paper explores social navigation support, an approach for providing personalized guidance within the open corpus of educational resources. Following the concepts of social navigation we have attempted to organize a personalized navigation support that is based on past learners’ interaction with the system. The study indicates that Knowledge Sea II became the students' primary tool for accessing the open corpus documents used in a programming course. The social navigation support implemented in this system was considered useful by students participating in the study of Knowledge Sea II. At the same time, some user comments indicated the need to provide more powerful navigational support, such as the ability to rank the usefulness of a page

Spotlight browsing of resource archives

Many organizations, particularly in the heritage sector, have large archives of digital content that they could make available to the general public or special interest groups if they had the appropriate mechanisms. Currently, these organizations can develop pre-crafted web sites, simple database-driven web sites or search facilities for accessing the content. However, none of these can be expected to appropriately present this content or scaffold its effective use. Our proposed solution is an approach to navigation that we term spotlight browsing. It has the following key features: (i) Users can select a collection of resources from the archive, shining a spotlight on this area of the archive; (ii) The collection is structured in a number of ways to support its exploration and convey interesting properties of the collection; (iii) Users can see what is on the periphery of their current collection in order to encourage further exploration; (iv) Users can redefine the collection in order to move their spotlight to another area of the archive; (v) Any item viewed while browsing can be bookmarked into a personal collection that can be built up using resources from many different spotlights. The approach has been implemented and tested using an archive of content from a heritage institution

Improving self-organising information maps as navigational tools: A semantic approach

Purpose - The goal of the research is to explore whether the use of higher-level semantic features can help us to build better self-organising map (SOM) representation as measured from a human-centred perspective. The authors also explore an automatic evaluation method that utilises human expert knowledge encapsulated in the structure of traditional textbooks to determine map representation quality. Design/methodology/approach - Two types of document representations involving semantic features have been explored - i.e. using only one individual semantic feature, and mixing a semantic feature with keywords. Experiments were conducted to investigate the impact of semantic representation quality on the map. The experiments were performed on data collections from a single book corpus and a multiple book corpus. Findings - Combining keywords with certain semantic features achieves significant improvement of representation quality over the keywords-only approach in a relatively homogeneous single book corpus. Changing the ratios in combining different features also affects the performance. While semantic mixtures can work well in a single book corpus, they lose their advantages over keywords in the multiple book corpus. This raises a concern about whether the semantic representations in the multiple book corpus are homogeneous and coherent enough for applying semantic features. The terminology issue among textbooks affects the ability of the SOM to generate a high quality map for heterogeneous collections. Originality/value - The authors explored the use of higher-level document representation features for the development of better quality SOM. In addition the authors have piloted a specific method for evaluating the SOM quality based on the organisation of information content in the map. © 2011 Emerald Group Publishing Limited