Ensemble Semantic Technologies for the Enhancement of Case Based Learning Patrick Carmichael, Project Director
About the Project 3 years £1.5 Million FEC Five UK Universities (Cambridge, City, UEA, Stirling, Essex) and two international partners (MIT and UT Sydney) Engaging with c.6-8 disciplinary settings across UG and PG courses at Cambridge and City Team includes education researchers, cognitive scientists, computer scientists and disciplinary specialists
The Project’s Starting Points Complexity, Controversy and Change The Expert Learner –Experts in the field –Experts at learning “Cases as Curriculum” The emerging “Semantic Web” as a potential means of supporting and enhancing case- based teaching and learning
What is the Semantic Web? Web 3.0? The ‘next generation’ of the WWW? An extension to the existing world wide web which allows reasoning across diverse data A set of standards A set of services, data sources, ‘reasoning engines’ and user interfaces A means of constructing areas of ‘high density’ of data linked in diverse ways, within the existing ‘sparse’ network of WWW resources
Semantic Web or Semantic Technologies? The Semantic Web ‘vision’ of 2001 was of personalised and ‘just-in-time’ services from across a unified, machine- readable WWW But what has emerged since then is: –A set of useful standards –Guidance as to how resources could be made more accessible –And hence also improved search tools and ‘portals’ –And some interesting demonstrations of ‘closed worlds’ Lots of applications could be made ‘a bit more semantic’ by selective use of Semantic Technologies
Semantic Technologies for Education Three areas for potential development: –Personal Educational Administration –Management of Learning Networks (People, Data, Services …) –Collaboration and Knowledge Construction These last two in particular make Semantic Technologies potentially useful in the management and representation of complex data and the elaboration of complex arguments - such as those characteristic of case-based learning.
Which Semantic Technologies? Aggregators and Reasoning Engines Databases Multimedia Collections Published Materials Thesauri, Ontologies etc Conversion Services Devices Collaborative Environments Visualisations Services and APIs
Some Early Work from the Project Summer Present: –Exploring semantic technologies for teaching & learning –Not explicitly case based as yet –UROP Students as ‘expert learners’
The Edwardians An existing qualitative data set from the UK Data Archive. Faceted browser built using the SIMILE toolkit
Maths for Engineers Diverse resources to support learners Aggregated and presented through faceted browser
Plant Evolution Timeline Links to datasets, publications, course materials and images Presented using an interactive timeline visualisation
Contact Details Project Website – –RSS Feed –Newsletter TEL Programme Website – CARET Contacts –Patrick –Katy