Paul Miller at Nodalities posted this responding to thinking going on in the UK at the JISC CETIS 2007 Conference in a session called Semantic Structures for Teaching and Learning. All the position papers in the latter link are well worth the read--they provide some nice perspectives on education in the context of finding and using information. What follows is some responses to particular ideas raised around the session, then a sneak peek at how some of this is playing out at UMW.

Semantic Web at the Periphery

The abstract to Semantic Structures for Teaching and Learning observes:

Given that semantic technologies have the unique ability to dynamically describe complex and evolving concepts, resources and relationship one would expect these technologies to be highly applicable to the domain of teaching and learning. And yet, to date, the majority of standards, tools and applications which we recognise as “educational technologies” have been heavily based on grammatical approaches such as XML, HTML, etc. Accessible applications, such as those designed to support the development and analysis of conceptual relationships (e.g. mind mapping tools), are not always based on open standards and have not been particularly widely or effectively exploited by the teaching and learning community. To many teaching practitioners semantic technologies have largely remained a peripheral academic interest.

At least here in the US, the grump that springs immediately to mind is BlackBoard, the course management system that is all too widely used in higher education and even secondary education institutions. Its near-ubiquity has made it almost synonymous with "instructional technology" among many faculty members. I'm not at all the first to see BlackBoard as much more about administration than about teaching and learning, but the conflation of the two remains strong. Thus, it is too easy for faculty to see their real insights into teaching as at the periphery of technology, only because their ingrained experience of technology in learning -- BlackBoard -- is, well, at the periphery of teaching and learning. Mikael Nilsson touches on this in his position paper, seeing a "[f]ocus on LMSs and other “silo”-like vertical systems that feel they have little need for semantic interoperability".

Writing about a different context, Tore Hoel sees something similar, I think, in his position paper:

As long as I have been involved with learning technology standardisation I have observed an unlucky absence of pedagogical discourse. The best example is the unwillingness to discuss what is the scope of SCORM. We should realise that learning, education and training have different scopes. Training is often about getting a corporate (or other) view across. Education is more a rhetoric activity in a classical sense (Laurillard, 2002), often with a strong will of some Ministry of Truth to give an authoritative view of a domain. Learning, however, is another matter. The learners are often interesting in constructing their own knowledge, in cooperation with other fellow learners.

The need to nudge (or thrust) pedagogical discourse more into the center of teaching and learning technology is present in a wider arena than just the role of the semantic web. Hence David Millard's statement:

There is a growing feeling amongst e-learning technologists that we should shift away from institutionally owned Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) towards Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) that are more respectful of this Web Literacy.

Here at the University of Mary Washington, a day hardly goes by without Jim Groom discovering a new joy in the learning taking place in our WPMU installation. (Note the place of blogging in Scott Wilson's diagram of PLEs and the institution.)

So what of the Semantic Web? (or, following Mike Bergmann, the structured web). Here's an admittedly limited scale example that we're working on.

RavenDesk

This project sprang from the particular problem that students in higher education too quickly and easily see their courses as disparate items to check off a list. Especially at a liberal arts institution, we want and need students to make connections between courses, especially courses across disciplines (cf. "integration across domains"). So we (Steve Greenlaw, Gardner Campbell -- don't miss his recent interview with Jon Udell, Jeff McClurken, and myself) are building a mechanism for students explicitly to make connections--just a short paragraph--connecting two of their courses. Gardner gave them the whimsical name of "RavenDesks," after the unsolvable riddle in "Alice in Wonderland". The idea is also to get a visual display of such connections to reinforce the interrelationships. Here's a screenshot of what we've got so far:

It uses XUL and SVG, so it's no good in Internet Explorer--spread Firefox. Clicking on a light bulb shows the text of the connection, along with info about the courses. Students can also tag their connections. Right now, it is just using RDF for all the data. I.e., it isn't exposed to the web, nor is it (yet!) drawing in other RDF material.

So why do this as a Semantic Web application? The key is in where this should go. Ultimately, this will be a view of the intellectual life at the university. It should therefore also connect to the intellectual life beyond the university. The Semantic Web is just the ticket for that. Moreover, this should eventually not only be about courses. It should include books, wikipedia entries, songs, conferences, cocktail-party conversations, and more. There again, the Semantic Web makes it easy to pull those various domains into play here, and DBpedia.org has already made much of that just a SPARQL query away.