http://www.ensemble.ac.uk

Libraries@Cambridge 2009

EnsembleSemantic Technologies for the Enhancement of

Case Based Learning

Patrick Carmichael, Project Director

http://www.ensemble.ac.uk

About the Project

• 3 years 2008-2011• £1.5 Million FEC• Five UK Universities (Cambridge, City, UEA, Stirling,

Essex) and two international partners (MIT and UT Sydney)

• Engaging with c.6-8 disciplinary settings across UG and PG courses at Cambridge and City

• Team includes education researchers, cognitive scientists, computer scientists and disciplinary specialists

http://www.ensemble.ac.uk

The Project’s Starting Points

• Complexity, Controversy and Change• The Expert Learner

– Experts in the field– Experts at learning

• “Cases as Curriculum”

• The emerging “Semantic Web” as a potential means of supporting and enhancing case-based teaching and learning

http://www.ensemble.ac.uk

What is the Semantic Web?

• Web 3.0?• The ‘next generation’ of the WWW?• An extension to the existing world wide web which

allows reasoning across diverse data• A set of standards• A set of services, data sources, ‘reasoning engines’

and user interfaces• A means of constructing areas of ‘high density’ of

data linked in diverse ways, within the existing ‘sparse’ network of WWW resources

http://www.ensemble.ac.uk

Semantic Web or Semantic Technologies?

• The Semantic Web ‘vision’ of 2001 was of personalised and ‘just-in-time’ services from across a unified, machine-readable WWW

• But what has emerged since then is:– A set of useful standards– Guidance as to how resources could be made more accessible– And hence also improved search tools and ‘portals’– And some interesting demonstrations of ‘closed worlds’

• Lots of applications could be made ‘a bit more semantic’ by selective use of Semantic Technologies

http://www.ensemble.ac.uk

Semantic Technologies for Education

• Three areas for potential development:– Personal Educational Administration – Management of Learning Networks (People, Data, Services …) – Collaboration and Knowledge Construction

• These last two in particular make Semantic Technologies potentially useful in the management and representation of complex data and the elaboration of complex arguments - such as those characteristic of case-based learning.

http://www.ensemble.ac.uk

Which Semantic Technologies?

Aggregators and Reasoning

Engines

Databases Multimedia Collections

PublishedMaterials

Thesauri,Ontologies

etc

Conversion Services

Devices CollaborativeEnvironments

Visualisations

Services and APIs

http://www.ensemble.ac.uk

Some Early Work from the Project

• Summer 2008 - Present: – Exploring semantic technologies for teaching & learning– Not explicitly case based as yet– UROP Students as ‘expert learners’

http://www.ensemble.ac.uk

The Edwardians

• An existing qualitative data set from the UK Data Archive.• Faceted browser built using the SIMILE toolkit

http://www.ensemble.ac.uk

Maths for Engineers

• Diverse resources to support learners• Aggregated and presented through faceted browser

http://www.ensemble.ac.uk

Plant Evolution Timeline

• Links to datasets, publications, course materials and images• Presented using an interactive timeline visualisation

http://www.ensemble.ac.uk

Contact Details

• Project Website– http://www.ensemble.ac.uk– RSS Feed– Newsletter

• TEL Programme Website– http://www.tlrp.org/tel/

• CARET Contacts– Patrick Carmichael: wpc22@cam.ac.uk– Katy Jordan: klj33@cam.ac.uk