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Tech Report kmi-03-12 Abstract


Semantic Services in e-Learning: an Argumentation Case Study
Techreport ID: kmi-03-12
Date: 2003
Author(s): Emanuela Moreale, Maria Vargas-Vera
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This paper outlines an e-Learning services architecture offering semantic-based services to students and tutors, in particular ways to browse and obtain information through web services. Services could include registration, authentication, tutoring systems, smart question answering for students' queries, automated marking systems and a student essay service. These services - which might be added incrementally to the portal - could be integrated with various ontologies such as ontologies of educational organisations, students and courses. In this paper, we describe a few scenarios in the e-learning domain and illustrate the role of a few services. We also describe in some detail a service doing semantic annotation of argumentation in student essays for allowing visualisation of argumentation and providing useful feedback to students.
 
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Social Software is...


Social Software
Social Software can be thought of as "software which extends, or derives added value from, human social behaviour - message boards, musical taste-sharing, photo-sharing, instant messaging, mailing lists, social networking."

Interacting with other people not only forms the core of human social and psychological experience, but also lies at the centre of what makes the internet such a rich, powerful and exciting collection of knowledge media. We are especially interested in what happens when such interactions take place on a very large scale -- not only because we work regularly with tens of thousands of distance learners at the Open University, but also because it is evident that being part of a crowd in real life possesses a certain 'buzz' of its own, and poses a natural challenge. Different nuances emerge in different user contexts, so we choose to investigate the contexts of work, learning and play to better understand the trade-offs involved in designing effective large-scale social software for multiple purposes.