SemWeb to answer educational Challenges
Ensemble is a 3-year, £1.5million publicly-funded research project so called because it brings together several universities and a multitude of research experience. One of its primary aims is to explore how the Semantic Web can be used to support education in general, and case-based pedagogy in particular.
It also looks like they’re after creating applications and developers’ tools about mid-way through the project: so they don’t seem to be in it for the purely theoretical!
We have some more information over on the Xiphos blog.
July 26th, 2008 at 4:07 am
Ok, so help me out here. “Cased based” learning looks to me like another term for or description of constructivism. Tell me more how the Sematic web will support this.
July 28th, 2008 at 12:20 pm
[...] SemWeb to answer educational Challenges [...]
July 29th, 2008 at 11:22 am
Hi, Jim.
I’m not entirely sure what Ensemble see as possible. It seems to me that the main focus of their three-year project is in answering exactly what you just asked. They do a have a bit more information about the sorts of things they’re interested in (particularly in class interaction and data management), but that’s very much what they’re asking themselves.
The way I understand it, they’re basically looking at what the Semantic Web is (machine-readable and therefore augmentable connections among data), and asking how this could be applied to education. They see a specific relevance to case-based learning, which is, I’m afraid, something I don’t know much about personally. I seem to remember lectures on case-based learning in language acquisition modules at university, but they obviously didn’t stick
.
Talis’ own educational division—Xiphos: http://www.talis.com/xiphos—would probably be a more relevant place to find discussion about it. The other thing to do would be to ask the Ensemble team themselves. They might have a white paper or similar you could read?
July 29th, 2008 at 11:23 am
Actually, as follow-up, the Ensemble website–http://tel.caret.cam.ac.uk/—has a lot of the information you’re after. They have a section on the right called Project Perspectives with specific information about case-based learning and the Semantic Web.
I’ll go read it, actually…