*SUbTLE project overview

The SUbTLE project builds on the results of two separate EU projects, the work of the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) on the CIPHER project and the work of the Institute of Educational Technology (IET) UserLab on the MOBIlearn project.

One of the outcomes of the CIPHER project was a set of tools for exploring annotated digital resources. The MOBIlearn project produced a number of models for guiding the design and development of content for mobile learning. The SUbTLE project aims to build on these outcomes in order to produce a set of educational tools for facilitating learning in mobile contexts.

Three distinct activities are being carried out under the umbrella of the SUbTLE project:

1. OU communications group

A web portal is being developed for visitors to the OU. The OU communications group hosts visitors from other academic institutions seeking to find out more about the approach to distance education developed and used here. A broad range of resources are used by the communications group to explain the history and approach of the OU.

The portal will provide a single source for this information which the communications group can then use to provide personalised presentations for visitors.

2. MSc course

The idea behind the semantic web is that the semantics of web pages (i.e. meaning) will be described in a format accessible by both people and computers. The technology to provide such a system is rapidly becoming available, in one of the OU's Masters level courses in Open and Distance Education (H802) students explore how the semantic web may be used in an educational context.

The Mobile Information Service developed in the CIPHER project is used as a case-study example to give OU students practical experience of the semantic web.

3. Bletchley Park school application

The suitability of mobile phones as a ubiquitous unobtrusive technology to support learning is being explored through the use of the Mobile Information Service at Bletchley Park.

The use of the system and the pedagogical benefits of such systems to museums and other heritage centres are being explored using the models developed in the MOBIlearn project.

*SUbTLE team

Andrew Brasher - http://iet.open.ac.uk/pp/a.j.brasher/
Trevor Collins - http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/trevor/
Patrick McAndrew - http://iet.open.ac.uk/pp/p.mcandrew/
Paul Mulholland - http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/paulm/
Josie Taylor - http://iet.open.ac.uk/pp/j.taylor/
Zdenek Zdrahal - http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/zdenek

*Related projects

CIPHER: Communities of Interest Promoting Heritage of European Regions
Web address: http://cipherweb.open.ac.uk

MOBIlearn: Exploring context-sensitive approaches to informal, problem-based and workplace learning by using key advances in mobile technologies
Web address: http://www.mobilearn.org