The digital Curriculum - The Curriculum as a service on the Semantic Web The Annofolio project

Fredrik Paulsson Associate Professor Umeå University, Applied Educational Sciences (Interactive Media and Learning)

First of all Sorry about my crappy animations,but I couldn’t resist...

Disposition The objective of the project History and background The recipe - our approach and methodology Results and conclussions Exemples of services Digital curriculum our new project

One (and only one) main objective: Making the curriculum (documents) useful for digital services for schools Hence: enabling the curriculum for a digital world: by machine readability and machine processability! WHY? It’s an important part of representation of the pedagogical process Hence: it needs to be able to connect and relate to other parts of the information infrastructure (ecology): digital learning resources, learning designs, PDP:s etc.

A bit of history and background the Annofolio project and the Swedish curriculum (the national steering documents)

The Swedish curriculum in a nutshell - A hierarchical view

The Curriculum recipe AnalyzeAnalyze the documents of the Curriculum Store the documents in a suitable data format (preferably standardized, machine readable and machine processable) Add structural and semantic markup (metadata and annotations)structural and semantic markup Use the curriculum as a component in digital services! A few examples: Connect the curriculum to Learning Object Repositories (after a similar markup process ) For chunking up the documents and for creating digital compendia Connecting personal development plans and the curriculum For analyzing the curriculum and for quality work

AnalysisAnalysis of the curriculum Central concepts

XML = structure = syntax TEI = semantics in the XML-file = not good! For that reason DocBook was chosen as the basic format instead (v 2.0 will use CEF) Basic markup- & and structural markup = DocBook Structural markup DocBook & TEI (CEF in version 2.0)

Resource (example shows a course plan with structural markup - DocBook) Bibliographic metadata (E.g. Dublin Core, DC) Domain specific metadata (E.g.. Learning Object Metadata, LOM) Other domain specific metadata (E.g. DC Education, subject specific metadata etc.) ”Own” metadata { Metadata Record(s) (metadata that is separated from the resource and according to suitable metadata scheme) Can be stored in different ways - such as in a learning object repository or a registry as/in a file etc. The markup methodology

Metadata & document with structural markup Metadata that is owned and maintained by ”someone else”, for example, an agency xPointer (via Annotea) Annotation/comment (for example by teachers) Domain specific metadata (LOM, CML, GML etc.) Metadata X (accord.ing to Application profile Y) Annotations/comments (by a student) Annotation/metadata/comments (by an educational publisher ) Metadata- eco-system!

Finally Use the curriculum as a component in digital services! A few examples: Connect the curriculum to Learning Object Repositories (after a similar markup process ) For chunking up the documents and for creating digital compendia Connecting personal development plans and the curriculum For analyzing the curriculum and for quality work

A number of marked-up curriculum documents A methodology for markup A prototype for markup, annotation and access (API) of the documents Five example prototypes Digital compendia Search and browse the curriculum Annotation and metadata management Connection between the curriculum and digital learning resources (repositories) System for publishing to different formats/media PROJECT RESULTS = Published as research results

Services: examples

Document X, clip 1 Document Y, clip 2 New file - ”compendium” of clip 1 & clip 2 XSL-transformation + CSS XSL CSS XSL CSS XSL XML-filestylesheet XSL(T)/FOP System for layout & publishing Bonus

The future (is now): new possibilities

New and matured technology Open Linked Data (Web 3.0) A new international standard format for curriculum (the Curriculum Exchange Format - CEF) New swedish curriculum in 2011 New research to build upon A NEW WORLD

New (2.0) project starts in 2011 Financed for 2 years (+ 4 years for a PhD student) Using Curriculum Exchange Format (CEF) Using Open Linked Data and other Semantic Web Technology Dynamically linking the curriculum to other data sources, such as the Wikipedia (DBpedia)and Europeana Refining and adapting the markup methodology to recent developments