Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Remember that commercial: “It’s 10 p.m. Do you know where your children are?”

Learn how the Semantic Web is changing the way we treat data at the LinkedData Planet Conference. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web and director of the W3C, is among the event’s keynote speakers.

These days, chances are that they’re as likely to be surfing the web as anywhere else — or, more specifically, whiling away the late night hours on Facebook, MySpace, or YouTube. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but wouldn’t it be nice if there was an alternative social networking space where they could interact with each other as well as learn in a creative environment, too?

“A parallel vision is to get kids sticky on education, instead of pure socialization in the network,” says Rebecca Dias, VP of Software Development, at SynapticMash, a vendor of adaptive learning systems based on semantic web technologies.

Dias will be speaking about the social internet and its potential promise at the upcoming LinkedData Planet conference in New York City on June 17 and 18. “We want to create a creative space for learning where kids can cross-educate themselves.”

In the summer, SynapticMash plans to release its MashQube environment, an eco-system for educators, parents, and students to collaborate on curriculum development, content, and learning.

Its infrastructure platform services, hosted off-site, utilize semantic web technologies to enable the integration of data from various educational technologies that will be required to support such a collaborative environment. That underpins the company’s LearningQube tools, as well, which provide secure, real-time access to student data; proactively informs teachers about student trends based on the analysis of information such as assessment scores, grades, and attendance; and collaborates with district student information systems to publish data to parents, students, teachers, and administrators. As it turns out, there are a lot of similarities between enterprise and educational environments — and not always positive ones.

“Education has nightmarish integration problems, silos of data, not well-described or easily accessed, possibly bound to legacy systems, and there may be licensing restrictions that don’t allow access to certain data,” says Dias.

If you thought business deadlines were tough to meet, consider the plight of the teacher with 120 kids and just a 15-minute window to prepare for the next day’s classes.

“That’s intense,” says Dias. “There are tons of pieces of data flying at you at this point.”

Learn how the Semantic Web is changing the way we treat data at the LinkedData Planet Conference. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web and director of the W3C, is among the event’s keynote speakers.

That includes information from different test assessments throughout the year, or data on disciplinary referrals, for example — how do you match these all up to strategies for the classroom, the grade, the student body, the district or for a particular child. For instance, a child with many disciplinary referrals also may perform at accelerated levels on tests, and perhaps the strategy should be to offset boredom by turning that child into a classroom leader. “We provide that data in a powerful construct, we use metadata to turn it into AI, to provide some semblance of guidance to what is going on,” says Dias.

When teachers miss opportunities in these areas, a lot is at stake — for the student, of course, but also for the school and perhaps even the nation. Schools can lose funding if the student body doesn’t display certain proficiencies, and the reported 50 percent high school dropout rate in the U.S. is at a crisis level. “That kind of thing should cause panic,” says Dias.

For school and district administration, being able to integrate data from multiple sources also leads to better analysis of information that can lead to real change.

“From a district perspective, districts want information so they can impact change,” says Dias. “They want to impact dropout rates, to make sure that the money spent on teachers’ professional development will have impact, who the kids are in need who can be facilitated. Often they run these reports, but they can’t access the data in a timely fashion to impact the change, so they’re often frustrated.”

Dias notes that because SynapticMash does all the back end work and hosts the solution, school and district technology staff won’t have to know a thing about the semantic web technology that powers the system. “We want to have the least impact on IT as possible so they can continue supporting other necessary things for the school system.”

Semantic Tech & Business Conference Returns to San Francisco

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