Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

The way students learn in the 21st century is changing. The way they’re being educated has to, as well.

City University, London, is a partner in a new semantic web effort to help effect this change. The university, in conjunction with Cambridge University Center for Applied Research into Educational Technologies (CARET) and the universities of East Anglia, Essex, and Stirling, is working on a project titled Semantic Technologies for the Enhancement of Case-Based Learning, which is being funded by a 1.5 million pound grant by the U.K.’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

“There is basic development in the semantic web in City University to develop tools and ontologies but what we are doing is looking at the semantic web’s potential for knowledge construction,” says Uma Patel, co-director of the project and lead researcher at City University, which specializes in business and the professions.

The project will rely on semantic web technologies to help forge interdisciplinary links in the service of tackling tasks such as problem-based and inquiry-based learning.

“Our vision is that the semantic web and teaching and learning in the 21st century is about more than knowledge transmission, but making sense of vast amounts of information. And it is more than enhanced search but using tools to create new knowledge.”

The collaborative project will explore teaching and learning around three case studies in detail: international journalism, maritime operations, and enterprise business innovation. As an example, City runs a masters’ program in international journalism that is organized with leading experts in the field, who come in and talk about how a story evolved. Teams of students then interrogate the expert on the case that he presented, and then take up elements of the story and look for other information to give them ways to extend the article, producing a newspaper story, radio broadcast, podcast, and so on.

“The semantic web might come in, in that we might want, after the presentation of a case by an expert, to introduce semantic web tools as a way of exploring the connections between stories that exist on the web, so students can discover them [and use them to create new content]. It’s creating new knowledge, constructing new ideas rather than regurgitating information that is fed to them,” Patel says.

Importantly, semantic web technologies can open the door to discovering interdisciplinary linkages to enrich the learning environment. For example, someone who majored in engineering may go into maritime operations; these students already have a strong engineering base and when they come to study for a masters’ program in maritime operations, they may be in search of a higher level of expertise around associated disciplines: the law of maritime operations, or finance, or security issues.

The SIMILE (Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information In unLike Environments) project tools will be used to develop light-weight demonstrators immediately relevant to the teaching settings. As part of this, City will lead the work on understanding new user requirements for developing these tools. Also part of the project will be long-term curation of large data sets, and cross-case analysis theory development. Additionally there will be user events, seminars and conferences as a way of disseminating results and engaging the community around this effort.

The project is set to run for three years in three phases, with an October launch. Its phases include the release of a set of tools for the developer community by summer 2010. Patel says of her hopes that “we might begin to understand learning in different ways, because up until now we have been segregating tools from learning. Maybe it’s not like that. Maybe tools change how people learn and do things.”

Beneficiaries, she says, will include everyone from students and teachers themselves to software developers who can leverage the extensions being built to SIMILE, to those who set policy on curriculum development to researchers, as the data sets and tools will be available as part of the case studies.

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