KMi Seminars
MUP/PLE lecture series
This event took place on Tuesday 17 May 2011 at 14:00

 
Fridolin Wild KMi, The Open University

Within this talk, a new (small) theory of learning with technology will be presented, which is grounded in methodical culturalism and activity theory. The theory boils down to grounding the development of rich professional competence in sharing language through social interaction, mediated by tools.

One model of putting this into practice is in using natural language processing tools to capture conceptual knowledge from learners’ communicative exchange, complemented by a represention of their practices of e.g. web interaction with a human-language-like mash-up scripting language.

Using a potent combination of latent semantic analysis and social network analysis, the learning of individuals and groups can then be dismantled and subjected to (computational) inspection.

A set of application examples rounds up the talk.

 
KMi Seminars Event | SSSW 2013, The 10th Summer School on Ontology Engineering and the Semantic Web Journal | 25 years of knowledge acquisition
 

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.