Semantic Learning Narratives: An Investigation of the Usage of Semantic Web Technologies to Support Learning

This report is about the intersections between narrative hypermedia and semantic web technologies for eLearning. Although various research has enhanced the hypermedia field by making use of semantic web technologies, there is little work in order to pitch this approach to an educational perspective. Actual eLearning technologies, focusing on the definition and re-use of learning objects (LO), often sacrifice the expressiveness of the metadata descriptors to the reusability of a resource. This leads to shallow semantic annotations, and consequently, from a pedagogical point of view, to a poor sequencing of the learning objects. In the first part of this report, we want to help the reader contextualize this problem and realize how it can be solved through the usage of domain ontologies, describing the important concepts in an area, and narrative ontologies, describing the fundamental pathways within a semantic space. In the second part of this work, instead we show how the instantiation of these two dimensions within a specific domain, philosophy, will allow us firstly to develop an application to test these ideas, secondly to compare other similar approaches and look out for an abstract layer of learning narratives independent from any domain.

Publication(s)

Semantic Learning Narratives, Pasin M., Motta E., SWED Workshop, KCAP-05, Banff, Canada.