KMi Seminars
Digital Literacy: Thinking Skills in the Digital Era
This event took place on Tuesday 02 September 2008 at 16:00

 
Prof. Yoram Eshet Open University of Israel

Operating modern digital environments such as computer software and digital instruments, requires users to master a large variety of cognitive, motor, sociological, and emotional skills, collectively termed "digital literacy". Mastering digital literacy skills is crucial for executing effectively digital tasks, such as reading” instructions from graphical displays in user interfaces, utilizing digital reproduction to create new, meaningful materials from existing ones, constructing knowledge from a nonlinear-hypertextual navigation, evaluating the quality and validity of information, process large volumes of real-time stimuli and conduct effective virtual communication with others in the cyberspace.

This newly emerging concept of digital literacy may be utilized as a measure of the quality of learners’ work in digital environments, and provide scholars and developers with a more effective means of communication in designing better user-oriented environments. The lecture suggests that, despite the large variety of existing digital environments, digital literacy can be reduced into "only" six major thinking skills, which are employed by users: photo-visual skills, reproduction skills, branching skills, information skills, real-time and socio-emotional skills. The lecture presents empirical results from studies which examined changes through time in digital skills among users from different age groups.

 
KMi Seminars
 

Semantic Web and Knowledge Services is...


Semantic Web and Knowledge Services
"The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation" (Berners-Lee et al., 2001).

Our research in the Semantic Web area looks at the potentials of fusing together advances in a range of disciplines, and applying them in a systemic way to simplify the development of intelligent, knowledge-based web services and to facilitate human access and use of knowledge available on the web. For instance, we are exploring ways in which tnatural language interfaces can be used to facilitate access to data distributed over different repositories. We are also developing infrastructures to support rapid development and deployment of semantic web services, which can be used to create web applications on-the-fly. We are also investigating ways in which semantic technology can support learning on the web, through a combination of knowledge representation support, pedagogical theories and intelligent content aggregation mechanisms. Finally, we are also investigating the Semantic Web itself as a domain of analysis and performing large scale empirical studies to uncover data about the concrete epistemologies which can be found on the Semantic Web. This exciting new area of research gives us concrete insights on the different conceptualizations that are present on the Semantic Web by giving us the possibility to discover which are the most common viewpoints, which viewpoints are mutually inconsistent, to what extent different models agree or disagree, etc...

Our aim is to be at the forefront of both theoretical and practical developments on the Semantic Web not only by developing theories and models, but also by building concrete applications, for a variety of domains and user communities, including KMi and the Open University itself.