There is no question that one of the major opportunities offered by the Web is vastly increased access to content. However this has brought with it a number of problems. Whereas paper based publication has evolved a range of effective mechanisms and standards over time – the structure of text books, mechanisms for review and publication, delivery methods – online publication is struggling to develop its own mechanisms, that do not restrict the benefits of access, but do provide confidence in its validity. In particular, traditional educational structures, processes and roles are well harmonised with the technology of printed materials – teachers and learners know how to work with books and libraries, and how to use them to support their purposes; institutions know how to acquire and pay for them.
This is not the case with online materials. Almost every aspect of online publication is problematic; although it is very simple to write and publish on the Web, describing content (metadata tagging), finding material, aggregating and disaggregating materials, reviewing, and rewarding authors are all areas that still need attention. There is no doubt that recent work in defining and developing a learning object approach addresses some issues, in particular making reusability more likely. The development of learning content interoperability specifications for metadata and content packaging directly address the searching and aggregation/disaggregation issue. If these specifications are widely adopted, then content will be able to run in different learning environments, preserving materials as environments evolve.
Despite this, major problems remain. What is the motivation for lecturers to make their resources available to others by tagging them with metadata? What is the role of information professionals (librarians) in this online world? Does eLearning require a restructuring of job roles? Who are the players in the learning object economy, and what will their roles be? How will it achieve sustainability?
This paper will discuss possible scenarios for a learning object economy, and examine the implications for the structure of educational institutions processes and roles.
Augmenting web pages with semantic contents, i.e., building a ‘Semantic Web’, promises a number of benefits for web users in general and learners in particular. Semantic technologies will make it possible to reason about the Web as if it was one extended knowledge base, thus offering increased precision when accessing information and the ability to locate information distributed across different web pages. Moreover, it will become possible to develop a range of additional educational semantic web services, such as interpretation or sense-making, structure-visualization, support for argumentation, novel forms of content customization, novel mechanisms for aggregating learning material, etc.
In my presentation I will first describe what semantic web is about and then illustrate a number of scenarios showing how semantic web technology can be harnessed to provide a much richer ‘web experience’ than what currently provided by web browsers and static web pages. In particular the ideas presented in these scenarios will be grounded on some of the work currently being carried out at the Knowledge Media Institute on semantic web browsing (Magpie) and on new forms of scholarly publishing (ScholOnto).The Magpie tool makes it possible to dynamically associate services with items found in web pages, on the basis of an underlying ontology. Thus, Magpie can be used to provide access (via a contextual menu) to complementary sources of knowledge, which can be used in contextualizing and interpreting the information found in a Web page.The ScholOnto project is building a prototype infrastructure to support the task of making scholarly claims about the significance of research documents. 'Claims' are made by making connections between ideas. The connections are grounded in a discourse/argumentation ontology, which supports innovative services for navigating, visualizing and analysing the network as it grows. Such a tool could be used in educational settings to allow students to develop easily a model of the current dialectics in a particular area of research.
Of course, the semantic web, like any other attempt at formalizing knowledge, carries a risk: to simplify what is complex, to impoverish what is rich. This is also a potential risk with some of the current work on learning objects. For this reason it is important not to lose focus of what the technology should be about: it should support users in making connections, engaging in critical analysis, locating the right knowledge and navigating and making sense of alternative teaching narratives. If used correctly, this technology could provide a quantum leap in the level of support available to students. If not, it will become yet another tool supporting reductionist approaches to learning and teaching.