·:[ frepa.blog ]:·
• • • • •

On 21 July 2008 an event "Sharing Vocabularies on the Web via SKOS", was held in the UK. It is now possible to take part of the presentations and recordings from that event. Some of them seem to be really interesting. In fact, the phenomenon Simple Knowledge Organization System is interesting.

This event, the third in ISKO UK’s KOnnecting KOmmunities series, was an opportunity to learn more about SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System), the up-and-coming standard for publishing controlled vocabularies on the Web.

The topic proved to be enormously popular. There were 94 people present coming from government, publishing and broadcasting agencies, public service organisations, commercial companies and academia. Reassuringly many practitioners were present including subject matter experts, librarians, information architects, software developers etc.
We were fortunate in having speakers from the forefront of SKOS development and implementation who were able to draw a general picture of the role of knowledge organization systems in the Semantic Web development but also guide us through the intricate details of what it means to express controlled vocabularies in such a way so that they their semantics can be exploited in information integration and discovery.

The deadline for submitting papers to the Second International Workshop on  Search and Exchange of e-le@rning Materials (SE@M’08) has been extended to the 30th of June.

Second International Workshop on Search and Exchange of e-le@rning Materials (SE@M’08)
(Formerly Learning Object Discovery & Exchange - LODE1)
 
 
CALL FOR PAPERS — NEW DEADLINE: JUNE 30, 2008 
 
The SE@M workshop is held in conjunction with the 3rd European Conference on
Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL’08 - http://www.ectel08.org/), Maastricht School
of Management, Maastricht, The Netherlands, September 17-19, 2008.
 
CONTEXT AND MOTIVATION
Creating good, pedagogically sound and effective learning resources incurs
substantial costs, so avoiding duplication of development efforts is important. The
TEL community has been and is still dedicating a lot of energy to the creation of
better and more reusable learning resources. Some of these efforts in the sphere of 
reusability have matured enough to lead to the creation of standards such as the IEEE
Learning Object Metadata, the IMS Content Package, or the IMS Common Cartridge.
Nowadays, the number of reusable educational resources available online, for free or
by subscription, is huge but most of these resources are “hidden” in repositories and
cannot be easily found, hampering their potential use and reuse.
 
Over the past few years, researchers and practitioners have started to address these
issues. Several initiatives worldwide (such as the EUN Learning Resource Exchange,
GLOBE, CORDRA) are developing solutions for federating e-learning systems and
unlocking the educational content hidden in repositories. Started last year, the work of
the IMS Group on Learning Object Discovery & Exchange aims at supporting these
initiatives by developing a set of specifications that facilitate the discovery and
retrieval of distributed learning resources.
 
The main goals of the international workshop on search and exchange of e-learning
materials are to bring together researchers and practitioners working in the field of
learning resource retrieval, facilitate the exchange between them and foster future
collaborations. It aims at offering a forum where these researchers and practitioners
can discuss theoretical aspects, open issues, and innovative approaches and share the
latest advances in the state of the art and practices for discovering and exchanging
learning content.
 
The dominant focus of this year’s workshop will be on the presentation of both long
and short refereed papers. We also plan to include a keynote speech and a panel
discussion.
                                                

Note: It has been decided to rename the workshop: “international workshop on
search & exchange of e-le@rning materials (SE@M)” to avoid any confusion with
the work of IMS on Learning Object Discovery and Exchange (IMS LODE). 
 
 2
 
TOPICS OF INTEREST (include, but are not limited to)
• Infrastructures for learning resource discovery and exchange
o Interoperable content and metadata repositories
o Protocols for exposing content
o Federations of learning resources
o Service registries
• Rich description of resources
o Metadata
o Standards and application profiles
o Automatic metadata generation versus human indexing
o Intellectual property and metadata
o Contextual Attention Metadata
o Mapping and crosswalks between metadata standards
• Discovering content
o User profiling for more accurate resource discovery
o Retrieval of learning resources (searching, browsing)
o Content aggregation
o Interoperable query languages
o Harvesting versus federated searching
o Enhanced search mechanism (sorting, ranking)
o Inclusion of other type of content (library, cultural heritage)
o Recommendation systems
o Quality aspects
• Exchanging content
o Resource identification
o Open content and reusable resource licensing
o Reliable auditing (tracking, reporting) 
o DRM, licensing and content protection
• WEB-2.0 approaches (folksonomies, content syndication) 
• Semantic web approaches
 
 SUBMISSIONS
Authors are invited to submit original unpublished research as full papers (max. 10 pages) or
work-in-progress as short papers (max. 5 pages). All submitted papers will be peer-reviewed
by three members of the program committee for originality, significance, clarity and quality.
Accepted papers will be published online as EC-TEL workshop proceedings as part of the
CEUR Workshop proceedings series. CEUR-WS.org is a recognized ISSN publication series,
ISSN 1613-0073.
 
Moreover, the two best papers of the workshop will be published in a special issue of the
International Journal of Technology-Enhanced  Learning
(IJTEL –  http://www.inderscience.com/browse/index.php?journalCODE=ijtel )
 
Authors should use the Springer LNCS format (http://www.springer.com/lncs ).

For camera-ready format instructions, please see “For Authors“ instructions at
http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html .
All questions and submissions should be sent to: seam2008@eun.org

IMPORTANT DATES
• Paper Submission: June 30, 2008
• Notification of acceptance: July 13, 2008
• Camera Ready Submission: August 10, 2008
• Workshop date: September 17, 2007
 
ORGANISERS
David Massart, Jean-Noël Colin and Frans Van Assche
European Schoolnet (EUN), Belgium
 
PROGRAM COMMITTEE
• Vladimir Batagelj, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia 
• Erik Duval, KUL, Belgium 
• Mike Halm, PennState University, USA 
• Manuel Kolp, UCL, Belgium 
• Robert Kristofl, BMUKK, Austria 
• Eugenijus Kurilovas, SMM, Lithuania 
• Jon Mason, InterCog, Australia
• Cu D. Nguyen, Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK-IRST), Italy
• Gilbert Paquette, Teluq, Canada 
• Fredrik Paulsson, Umeå University, Sweden 
• Tomasz Orzechowski, AGH, Poland 
• Alain Pirotte, UCL, Belgium 
• Daniel Rehak, Learning Systems Architecture Lab and Daniel Rehak Consulting LLC, USA 
• Griff Richards, SFU, Canada 
• Bernd Simon, Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien, Austria 
• Stefaan Ternier, KUL, Belgium 
• Tsuneo Yamada, NIME, Japan 

Teemu Leinonen at the FLOSSE Posse blog writes about the Finnish National curriculum that has got its own wiki . It is an interesting idea, and it remind a bit about our project, "Marking the national curricula" (paper in PDF-format) where we set up the infrastructure (the Annofolio) needed for annotating the Swedish National Curriculum. I think that a Wiki, in combination with our Annofolio and the forthcomming Curriculum Exchange Format (in Swedish) could provide very interesting opportunities for managing the curricula, as well as for integrating, and linking it into teaching and learning in a transparent way and connecting the curriculum to digital resources used for learning.

This I have to think a little bit more about…

Min avhandling (Modularization of the learning architecture: supporting learning theories by learning technologies) har uppmärksammats på flera ställen vilket givetvis är jättekul!

• På KKS Framtidens lärande: Mer flexibla lärandemiljöer
• På Øysten Johanessens blogg: Fredrik Paulsson har disputert
• På Skolporten, Forskning & utveckling
• På 計畫贊助者 (?)
• På En IKT-pedagogs funderingar

Min förhoppning är att den ska läsas och att det ska bli diskussion. Jag har försökt skriva så att både datavetare och pedagoger kan ha utbyte av att läsa den och jag hoppas att jag har lyckats.

Jag har tidigare skrivit om det paper som Mikael Nilsson m.fl. skrivit om harmonisering av metadata . Nu har frågan varit uppe på ISO (WG4) mötet i Korea. Peter Karlberg har skrivit om detta på Mjuk infrastruktur-bloggen:

Det finns två relativt etablerade metadatastandarder som används inom utbildningsvärlden - Dublin Core (DC) som handlar om resuser i mer generell mening (Böcker etc) och Learning Objekt Metadata (LOM) som mer fokuserar på digitala resurser. När vi nu inom ISO/JTC1 SC36 har tagit på oss att skapa en internationell standard på detta område har en ambition varit att vara “bakåtkompatibel”, dvs det skall vara möjligt att tolka en uppsättning metadata enligt LOM användandes ett verktyg gjort för MLR.

Nu har det visat sig att ambitionen att vara bakåtkompatibel med både LOM och DC är svårt - kanske t.o.m. egentligen inte möjligt. Dessutom är detta med metadatahantering en konst som utvecklats en hel del sedan de första initiativen togs. Främst under senare år har detta skett - åtminstone när det gäller hur/vad som skall standardiseras och inte minst på hur semantisk interoperabilitet skall åstadkommas. Dessa frågor adresserades av Nilsson i ovan nämnda bidrag och i andra texter sprungna ur hans tangentbord.

Det enkla svaret är alltså att man söker lösa interoperabilitetsfrågan genom att välja en gemensam abstrakt modell - DC har gjort det i den meningen att DC nu bygger på RDFs abstrakta modell. Det vi föreslagit WP4 att göra är sammalunda. Vårt förslag mottogs faktist ytterst väl, mötte egentligen inget motstånd men ledde förstås till en del frågor. Främsta invändningen vara faktiskt att det tar lite tid att vända skutan dvs ISOs regler när det gäller processen ställer till det lite eftersom den första delen av MLR redan varit ute på omröstning en gång. Nu återstår bara att få fram lite formuleringar till beslut.

Stephen Downes delivers a set of well deserved comments to Mikael Nilssons (Prolearn) paper on metadata harmonization. The paper is well worth reading for anyone who want to know more about different approaches to metadata.

Harmonization of Metadata Standards ~ Stephen’s Web ~ by Stephen Downes

This is a very good paper that surveys the obstacles to metadata harmonization in e-learning. Mikael Nilsson looks at five systems for identifying and describing learning resources: Learning Object Metadata (LOM), Dublin Core (DCMI), Resource Description Framework (RDF), Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS; used to encode MARC21 library records defined by the Library of Congress), and the MPEG-7 MDS used to define multimedia. The paper compares these very different specifications across a variety of dimensions, including structure, vocabulary, semantics, and value referencing. I fully endorse this paper; there’s nothing I would question, and it even highlights some biases (such as "a strong recommendation for basing identification on URIs") that I share. This is a high-level paper, but fundamental and very clearly written. It is easily accessible to all readers who are willing to give it the time it deserves. PDF. Mikael Nilsson, ProLearn, January 29,

Powered by ScribeFire.

Nu har Spindeln lanserats! Detta har vi (Inst. för interaktiva medier och lärande, IML ) gjort tillsammans med MSU. Spindeln är en söktjänst för digitala lärresurser för skolan. Idén är att göra det enklare för lärare och elever att hitta relevanta digitala lärresurser. Med Spindeln är det ännu så länge möjligt att söka efter fria lärresurser. Tekniken som Spindeln bygger på är en direkt tillämpning av vår och KMR-gruppens forskning om Semanic Web, digitala arkiv och tekniker för att koppla samma arkiv.

Vi kommer successivt att koppla in fler arkiv. Den stora utmaningen just nu är att försöka höja kvaliteten på metadata i de olika arkiven. Den är minst sagt varierande och det finns en hel del att förbättra för att på det sättet få bättre sökresultat…

Här finns pressinformationen från Umeå universitet

Här finns mer information från MSU

Version 2.1 of the Conzilla concept browser has been released . It was actually released in June, but I managed to miss that . However, it looks very promising, especially the support for collaboration.

We just released our concept browser Conzilla in version 2.1 together with our collaboration server Collaborilla 1.0. Both applications are open source and have been licensed under the GPL.

The biggest changes from the last version (2.0) are:

    * Support for collaborative conceptual modeling (publication of and contribution to context-maps), supported by the collaboration server Collaborilla.
    * Support for Dialogue Mapping.
    * Java Web Start support for easy installation and maintenance.
    * Refurbished user interface and usability improvements.
    * Export of context-maps to the formats SVG, PNG and JPEG.
    * Bookmarking functionality.
    * Improved layer management.
    * Color theme support.

Conzilla 2.1 requires a Java Runtime Environment in version 1.4.2 or newer.

Below is the call for a workshop with an interesting theme (at least if you find Learning Objects and repositories interesting ) that will be held at the 2nd European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL07).

 ***We apologize for cross-postings***

First International Workshop on Learning Object Discovery & Exchange (LODE 2007)

CALL FOR PAPERS

The LODE workshop is held in conjunction with the 2nd European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL07), Crete, Greece, September 17-20, 2007

CONTEXT AND OBJECTIVES

Although the use of learning (content) management systems is becoming common in most educational organizations and the number of educational resources available online, for free or by subscription, is huge, most of these resources are hidden in repositories and cannot be easily found, which hampers their potential use and reuse.

The goal of the workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners working at unlocking the educational content hidden in repositories and facilitating the retrieval and exchange of this content. The workshop aims at providing an international forum to highlight the state-of-the-art and discuss the issues and innovative approaches in the field.  Therefore, the workshop welcomes original/position/work-in-progress/experience papers on all aspects related to the discovery and retrieval of distributed learning resources. Submissions that identify new issues and focused directions for future work in the area are also welcome.

The workshop will be strongly discussion-oriented. To that effect, all accepted papers and posters will be made available online before the workshop at http://fire.eun.org/lode2007/.

TOPICS OF INTEREST (include, but are not limited to)

* Reusable resources
o Resource identification
o Open content and reusable resource licensing
* Metadata
o Standards and application profiles
o Automatic metadata generation vs human indexing
o Intellectual property and metadata
o Mapping and crosswalks between metadata standards
* Repositories
o Interoperable content and metadata repositories
o Protocols for exposing content
* Discovering content
o User profiling for more accurate resource discovery
o Content aggregation
o Service Registries
o Interoperable query languages
o Harvesting vs federated searching
o Enhanced search mechanism
o Inclusion of other type of content (library, cultural heritage)
o Recommendation systems
o Quality aspects
* Exchanging content
o Reliable auditing (tracking, reporting)
o DRM, licensing and content protection
* WEB-2.0 approaches (folksonomies, content syndication)
* Semantic web approaches

SUBMISSIONS

Authors are invited to submit original unpublished research as full papers (8 pages), work-in-progress as short papers (max. 4 pages) or position statements (max. 2 pages).
All submitted papers will be peer-reviewed by three members of the program committee for originality, significance, clarity and quality. Accepted papers will be published online as EC-TEL workshop proceedings as part of the CEUR Workshop proceedings series. CEUR-WS.org is a recognized ISSN publication series, ISSN 1613-0073. Authors should use the Springer LNCS format (http://www.springer.com/lncs ). For camera-ready format instructions, please see "For Authors" instructions at http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html.

All questions and submissions should be sent to: lode2007 @ eun . org

IMPORTANT DATES

* Paper Submission: June 20, 2007
* Notification of acceptance: July 15, 2007
* Camera Ready Submission: August 15, 2007
* Workshop dates: September 17 or 18, 2007

ORGANIZERS

* David Massart, European Schoolnet (EUN), Belgium
* Jean-Noel Colin, Sun Microsystems, Belgium

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

* Kerry Blinco, DEST, Australia
* Erik Duval, KUL, Belgium
* Mike Halm, PennState University, USA
* Marek Hatala, SFU, Canada
* Robert Kristofl, BMBWK, Austria
* Franois Magnan, Teluq, Canada
* Jon Masson, InterCog, Australia
* Martin Morrey, Intrallect, UK
* Gilbert Paquette, Teluq, Canada
* Fredrik Paulsson, UmeΠUniversity, Sweden
* Tomasz Orzechowski, AGH, Poland
* Alain Pirotte, UCL, Belgium
* Daniel Rehak, University of Memphis, USA
* Griff Richards, SFU, Canada
* Bernd Simon, WirtschaftsuniversitŠt Wien, Austria
* James Simon, Sun Microsystems, USA
* Stefaan Ternier, KUL, Belgium
* Tsuneo Yamada, NIME, Japan

ABOUT EC-TEL07

After the success of EC-TEL06, the Second European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning provides a unique forum for all research related to TEL, including its interactions with knowledge management, business processes and work environments.
This is a competitive and broad forum for TEL research in Europe and world-wide through specialized workshops and the main conference. EC-TEL07 provides unique networking possibilities for participating researchers throughout the week and includes project meetings and discussions for ongoing and new research activities supported by the European Commission. See http://www.ectel07.org/ for details.

Strax efter att jag beklagat mig över att Computer Sweden inte publicerat min debattartikel så publicerades den. Närmare bestämt i fredags (2006-06-16). Möjligen är det så att det uppstår en viss köbildning för publicering av debattartiklar i CS? Nåväl, den kan avnjutas på http://computersweden.idg.se/2.139/1.48164

I Computer Sweden (2006-05-19) fanns en artikel (med titeln "Finland får semantisk webb ") om arbetet med semantis webbteknologi i Finland. För att belysa att det inte är helt dött inom detta område i Sverige så skrev jag en debattartikel som jag skickade till Computer Sweden. Tyvärr verkar de inte särskilt intresserade av att publicera den så jag får helt enkelt publicera den här istället och hoppas att någon läser den i alla fall…

Även Sverige har en semantisk webb
I CS den 19 maj skriver Folke Schimanski om det finnländska arbetet med att bygga tjänster för den semantiska webben. Den semantiska webben och de tekniker som förknippas med denna får tyvärr oförtjänt lite uppmärksamhet i svensk datorpress. Det är därför glädjande att dessa artiklar ges utrymme.

Det är dock inte fullt så nattsvart i Sverige som man kan få intryck av. Även här utvecklas tjänster för den semantiska webben, ett arbete som dock har fått mest uppmärksamhet utanför Sveriges gränser. Inom e-lärande och för skolan utvecklas en rad tjänster som en del i en utveckling kopplad till forskning som har pågått sedan början av 2000-talet. Som exempel kan nämnas Mediebiblioteket på Sveriges Utbildningsradio (UR), NoTnavet (digitala lärresurser för naturvetenskap och teknik) och E-portföljen på Skoldatanätet. Kopplat till dessa ”innehållsarkiv” har det även utvecklats en prototyp till en tjänst som – med hjälp av semantisk webbteknik – skapar relationer mellan kunskapsmål i skolans styrdokument och digitala lärresurser.

Under hösten startar arbetet med att utveckla ytterligare en tjänst för skolans semantiska webb – en tjänst som på många sätt liknar MuseoSuomi, men Istället för att presentera en ”enhetlig nationell museisamling” så presenteras ett nationell nationellt fönster mot tusentals digitala lärresurser.

Även om dessa tjänster ännu bara använder en bråkdel av den potential som den semantiska webben har att erbjuda så innebär det trots allt att man tagit höjd för en framtid utveckling mot mer sofistikerade tjänster. Det finns dock oerhört mycket forskning och utveckling kvar att göra inom semantisk webbområdet - inte minst med inriktning mot e-lärande och skola. Tyvärr satsas det mycket lite resurser på detta i Sverige.

Arbetet med skolans semantiska webb är ett samarbete mellan bl.a. Myndigheten för skolutveckling, UR, Knowledge Management Research Group (KMR) på KTH, samt Institutionen för interaktiva medier och lärande (IML) vid Umeå universitet. Basen för flertalet av dessa tjänster är den öppna, svenskutvecklade utvecklingsplattformen för den semantiska webben: Standardized Contextualized Access to Metadata (SCAM).

Fredrik Paulsson
Lektor på IML , Umeå universitet
Samt medlem av KMR-gruppen , KTH

On wednesday, I gave a speech (an orientation) about the Semantic Web at SoftDev 2.0. The presentation was built on a couple of examples (real as well as fictional) from e-learning. The presentation can be downloaded from here . (it is partly in Swedish and partly in English)

On January 17 I held a presentation about our project on mark-up of the Swedish national curriculum for schools (or "steering documents" as we call them in Sweden). During the presentation I gave a brief introduction to metadata as well as to Semantic Web technology and the underlying view of metadata as being a growing dynamic "ecosystem" of information provided by different actors in a democratic fashion. In opposite to the (quite common) more authoritarian view, where metadata is static and provided and controlled by a few "chosen ones". In the second part of the seminar I gave an introduction to our Annotea-based approach for adding metadata descritions to the steering documents. Discussed the opportunities that the model provides as well as some of the problems. This model is described in detail in the article published at eChallenges 2005 [In English]. The curriculum mark-up project it self is described here [in Swedish] My presentation slides can be downloaded from here [in Swedish] Unfortuneatly the demo did not work since the WLAN at SIS is very secure (in other words: practically useless). This is however just a part of the WLAN-panic-epidemic, which I have noticed before [in Swedish]…

This is an important work in order to make two of the leading metadata standards move in a common direction. This work emphasizes the importance of RDF and Semantic Web technology as a mechanism for metadata interoperability.

Via the CEN/ISSS Learning Technology Standards Observatory (even though Mike is my colleague at KTH;)

In the context of the joint work item between DCMI and IEEE/LOM to develop a recommended representation of the metadata elements of the IEEE Learning Object Metadata Standard in the Dublin Core Abstract Model, Mikael Nilsson made a presentation to the IEEE/LOM meeting in Orlando in October 2005 outlining the approach and the current status.

Have a look at his presentation

Christmas Eve will be a little bit earlier this year… The third (an so far best) release of SCAM (Standardized Contextualized Access to Metadata) is planned to the 19th December. SCAM III will be much easier to install, use and develop than the earlier versions. Besides overall feature and performance improvements, we have made some serious changes to the SCAM architecture. Among the more notable changes are the exchange of the SCAM controller framework, to the use of a more general  web application framework: OpenSymphony’s WebWork. The use of WebWork - in combination of the use of the Java-based template engine: Velocity - have done wonders for the usability of SCAM, for users, developers and everyone in between. This also makes it much easier to integrate SCAM-based systems with other systems.

SCAM III will be released in three flavours:

• The SCAM III development platform, which is the development framework intended for anyone that want to develop advanced and sophisticated repository solutions based on Semantic Web Technology and RDF. The SCAM Development Platform, which is the core of SCAM is distributed as Source Code and/or JAR:s via Source Forge.
• SCAM III "Slasken" (which will have a new name at release day) is intended for anyone who, quick and easy, want to set up a Semantic Web and RDF-based repository solution. Without any deeper knowledge in programming or Semantic Web Technology it is possible to set up a repository (archive) solution for Learning Objects (or other other types resources of course), choose an existing metadata model (or implement your own) and adapt the web-based user interface to one of your choice. So there will be no excuse for not using Semantic Web Technology as anyone can use it now!
• An finally, crowning the work, SCAM III Portfolio. SCAM Portfolio is a very nice educational e-Portfolio solution built upon SCAM. A Student/Teacher (and parents?) portfolio system can easily be set up by downloading and installing the SCAM III Portfolio release. It will be distributed as a WAR-file or as bundled with TomCat and a database - Just to download and install in the simplest way possible. SCAM III Portfolio is of course based on Semantic Web Technology as well and by default it uses the most common metadata standards for e-learning and it is possible to add support for additional metadata standards and resource types. SCAM III Portfolio will be distributed via SourceForge, via EduForge and via the Swedish Schoolnet!

In connection to the SCAM III  release(s), we will also release some serious new SCAM documentation for users and developers. We will also make some (much needed) improvements to the SCAM website.

So, keep your eyes on http://scam.sourceforge.net/ around the 19th of December…