Beyond Web 2.0... And Beyond the Semantic Web

International audienceInitiated by Manuel Zacklad in 2003, the 'Socio-semantic Web' has recently seen important developments. Contrary to the Semantic Web, it is not interested in formal semantics but in semantics dependent on the human subject and on the semiotic substrate. Moreover, it aims at fostering people participation in knowledge work, such as Web 2.0 does for entertainment. In this trend, software design relies on three human and social phenomena: • documents, because they are proofs of something else, not in the manner of a mathematical proof but more in line of evidence that is kept and that can be mobilized; • interpretation, because the meaning of a document depends on its authors and readers; • intersubjectivity, because the confrontation between conflicting interpretations allows to overcome subjectivity. We illustrate our definition and design approach with descriptions of a course-material sharing platform and of a software enabling collaborative analysis

Informed learning in online environments: supporting the higher education curriculum beyond Web 2.0

As boundaries between physical and online learning spaces become increasingly blurred in higher education, how can students gain full benefit of Web 2.0 social media and mobile technologies for learning? How can we, as information professionals and educators, best support the information literacy learning needs of students who are universally mobile and Google-focused? This chapter presents informed learning (Bruce, 2008) as a pedagogical construct with potential to support learning across the higher education curriculum, for Web 2.0 and beyond. After outlining the principles of informed learning and how they may enrich the higher education curriculum, we explain the role of library and information professionals in promoting informed learning for Web 2.0 and beyond. Then, by way of illustration, we describe recent experience at an American university where librarians simultaneously learned about and applied informed learning principles in reshaping the information literacy program

How to achieve high customer satisfaction in Sabancı University Information Center

The Sabancı University is a young private university, which started providing education in 1999 in Istanbul. A “Search Conference” had been organized in order to find out “what kind of a university the country needed” and of its structure had been established on this understanding. At the first stage, the vision, the mission and the design of the university were completed, and the foundation of administrative infrastructure and selection of technology systems were materialized. Starting from the days of its foundation, the planning of the information services and facilities had been one of the main issues of the project. The university, which aims to become a world university, was accepted to be a member of the “European Foundation of Quality Management (EFQM)” regarding its activities in the stage of its foundation. A “Student and Staff Tendency Survey” which was implemented in 2001 indicated that the Information Centre was the strong side of the university. At the same time the Center's the statistics covering period of 1999-2007 also indicated that the targets were achieved under the strategic planning of the Center. In 2007, an user satisfaction survey in order to evaluate the conformity of the services and facilities, to identify its strong and weak areas, opportunities and threats through comparison and SWOT analysis for the future, and set up 2007-2011 five-years strategic planning and operational activity plan. The survey indicated that 95% of the participants are satisfied in general with the Center. In addition to these, the results of usage statistics between the years 1998-2009 indicated that utilizing of the services and facilities of the Information Center has increased from year to year. On the other hand, the results of the survey after the orientation programs show that the customer satisfaction is very high. We believe that the followings are the reasons of high user satisfaction. The Centre has a user and process focused pro-active management, learning organization structure, the availability of the suggestion system, continues benchmarking with the competitors and observing management and technological developments in the world. This paper presents to share our applications and plans on high user satisfaction rate, customer relation management activities and future planning

NoTube – making TV a medium for personalized interaction

In this paper, we introduce NoTube’s vision on deploying semantics in interactive TV context in order to contextualize distributed applications and lift them to a new level of service that provides context-dependent and personalized selection of TV content. Additionally, lifting content consumption from a single-user activity to a community-based experience in a connected multi-device environment is central to the project. Main research questions relate to (1) data integration and enrichment - how to achieve unified and simple access to dynamic, growing and distributed multimedia content of diverse formats? (2) user and context modeling - what is an appropriate framework for context modeling, incorporating task-, domain and device-specific viewpoints? (3) context-aware discovery of resources - how could rather fuzzy matchmaking between potentially infinite contexts and available media resources be achieved? (4) collaborative architecture for TV content personalization - how can the combined information about data, context and user be put at disposal of both content providers and end-users in the view of creating extremely personalized services under controlled privacy and security policies? Thus, with the grand challenge in mind - to put the TV viewer back in the driver's seat – we focus on TV content as a medium for personalized interaction between people based on a service architecture that caters for a variety of content metadata, delivery channels and rendering devices

Freeing up access to learning: the role for Open Educational Resources

The internet revolution of the last few years has had an impact on how we all live our lives. So it is not surprising that this is also a time of change in attitudes towards how we learn. Free access to information through computer networks has expanded, and part of that information flow are materials designed to help people learn. In addition there are many further online resources that help the learning process, even if that was not the original aim. However, there are risks in this evolution in access to information both for the end user, who can be confused by the options available to them, and to those involved in providing education, who may see their traditional role changing and becoming harder to perform. This situation provides the background for a growing movement to directly consider how education can be provided in a freer and more open way. This has been termed “Open Educational Resources” (OER). The exact definition of the term depends on interpretation, however a useful statement was provided as an outcome from an event organized by UNESCO in 2002 as: “OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge (Atkins, Brown and Hammond, 2007, p4).” Arguably the only difference between an online learning object and an open educational resource is the declaration that it is open. This may be true but that turns out to be a powerful difference. By being open the content can be accessed by any learner who can do so, it can be taken and run in new contexts, it can be reworked by others and adapted for local needs (with the result shared back if desired), it can be made part of shared pool of resources, it can be the shared point of reference for collaboration, and it can be the key to building policies that work in different domain

Library Resources: Procurement, Innovation and Exploitation in a Digital World

The possibilities of the digital future require new models for procurement, innovation and exploitation. Emma Crowley and Chris Spencer describe the skills staff need to deliver resources in hybrid and digital environments. The chapter demonstrates the innovative ways that librarians use to procure and exploit the wealth of resources available in a digital world. They also describe the technological developments that can be adopted to improve workflow processes and they highlight the challenges faced on this fascinating journey

The social web and archaeology's restructuring: impact, exploitation, disciplinary change

From blogs to crowdfunding, YouTube to LinkedIn, online photo-sharing sites to open-source community-based software projects, the social web has been a meaningful player in the development of archaeological practice for two decades now. Yet despite its myriad applications, it is still often appreciated as little more than a tool for communication, rather than a paradigm-shifting system that also shapes the questions we ask in our research, the nature and spread of our data, and the state of skill and expertise in the profession. We see this failure to critically engage with its dimensions as one of the most profound challenges confronting archaeology today. The social web is bound up in relations of power, control, freedom, labour and exploitation, with consequences that portend real instability for the cultural sector and for social welfare overall. Only a handful of archaeologists, however, are seriously debating these matters, which suggests the discipline is setting itself up to be swept away by our unreflective investment in the cognitive capitalist enterprise that marks much current web-based work. Here we review the state of play of the archaeological social web, and reflect on various conscientious activities aimed both at challenging practitioners’ current online interactions, and at otherwise situating the discipline as a more informed innovator with the social web’s possibilities