Symmetrical Positioning of Learners in Learning Networks with Content Analysis, Metadata and Ontologies. Presentation TENCompetence “Learning Networks for lifelong competence development”, Sofia 31 March 2006 Marco Kalz, Jan van Bruggen, Ellen Rusman, Bas Giesbers, Rob Koper, Marlies Bitter-Rijpkema. (OUNL)

What’s the problem? “A learner enters an educational environment without any profile or competence descriptions. The competence development program is highly informal not yet having information about the connected competences.” “ A learner enters with a standards-compliant ePortfolio for additional competence development.” “A learner enters with an ontology enriched learner profile and ontology based competence program definition.”

“Positioning” is a problem Learning networks are aimed to support various forms of learning activities both short trajectories and learning activities that may take years to complete. Learning and working including various interruptions. Learners may be engaged intermittently in different types of learning. The question: How do we take into account the goals and the history of the learner advise the best place to start and the optimal learning path through the learning network?

Overview The positioning problem Positioning situations matrix Content-based positioning Metadata-based positioning Ontology-based positioning Initial ideas for a positioning service Outlook and discussion

The positioning problem How can we recommend an “ideal” starting position for learners in competence development programs? How to connect the learner data (e.g. ePortfolios and repositories) in distributed environments for lifelong learning through a single service? How can we ensure the quality of a positioning service? Positioning differs from navigation and support, who derive their advice from the network. Positioning derives recommendations from the individual learner profile in relation to the competence information.

Positioning Situations Matrix Structured Data Unstructured Data Structured Data No competence descriptions Educational Resources Learner Information Metadata Based Competence Records Competence Ontology Metadata Based Competence Records X X X

Content Analysis (LSA) for Positioning. Content Analysis: use of Latent Semantic Analysis (Deerwester et al. 1990) Comparing word co-occurrences in ePortfolios and resources in CDP (competence development programme) (using an OU- GTP engine). Good results from the Ape-Corpus (van Bruggen et al. 2006)

LSA, content analysis for positioning. LSA handles documents and not competences. The results may be biased from an unbalanced allocation of material in the students ePortfolio. LSA is best suited for domains that rely on textual expression. Usefulness for positioning will be tested in a psychology course at the OUNL starting in summer.

Metadata Based Positioning Positioning based on information in the metadata. Different specification standards: RDCEO, RCD, IMS ePortfolio, HR XML, specs concerning learner information. Positioning through metadata-comparison: learner metadata and related CDP metadata (i.e learning object repositories) evt. via OAI protocol for Metadata Harvesting. Plan to test and evaluate different methods of Information Retrieval for the comparison of metadata.

Metadata Based Positioning Metadata standards inform about where information on competences should be stored but not what. A missing link: the interoperability standards serve the purpose of sharing metadata, they do not ensure the semantics of data. Leaves different ways to describe the same learning outcome. So: how can we connect the different standards and specifications? Use of user-contributed metadata? Be aware of the problems: metadata becoming metacrap. (Doctorow, 2001)

Ontology Based Positioning Ontologies are controlled vocabularies of concepts. Competence ontologies can describe competences, sub-competences and levels of proficiency in a specific domain. Advantage is to work with a clear-cut model of competences for positioning. Use for positioning assumes availability of competence ontologies already mapped on existing resources. Competence ontologies have to be connected to UoL. Who will provide and design these competence ontologies?

Ontology Based Positioning Borges (in Foucault’s The Order of Things,1966) presents in The Analytical Language of John Wilkins a Chinese Encyclopedia where animals are divided into. –those that belong to the Emperor, –embalmed ones, –those that are trained, –suckling pigs, –mermaids, –fabulous ones, –stray dogs, –those included in the present classification, –those that tremble as if they were mad, –innumerable ones, –those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, –others, those that have just broken a flower vase, –those that from a long way off look like flies. Showing the problem with static ontologies, granularity.

Positioning service: initial ideas

Outlook Positioning Service LSAMetadataOntologies This positioning is the focus of PhD research of Marco Kalz. Starting with 1 st case. Use of LSA engine in a Psychology course OUNL, summer Experiment with use of SCAM (Standardized Contextualized Access to Metadata) for ePortfolio since it can handle different kinds of metadata.

Discussion Questions? Comments? Suggestions? THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION Contact: Marlies Bitter-Rijpkema ( avalaible during the conference): Mail: Marco Kalz.