Teacher education services based on the Semantic Web: the experience of the Share.tec project

Main Article Content

Stefania Bocconi
Luigi Sarti
Jeffrey Earp

Abstract

This work describes some of the web services that have been developed within the Share.TEC project to foster access, sharing and reuse of Teacher Education digital resources at European level. The Share.TEC platform features personalized functions to help users search for and select educational material via a broad repository of metadata records. These describe educational resources from various European countries and draw on an ontology that captures concepts pertaining to teacher education and maps them across a variety of cultural and linguistic contexts. The article also presents Share.TEC’s adaptivity mechanisms, in particular the recommending functionality. This provides extra search support that reduces the need to explicitly specify all the query parameters. Finally, the article reports on the project’s impact on the European Teacher Education sector, and on future development directions.

Article Details

Section
Articles - Special Issue

References

Alvino S., Forcheri P., Ierardi M.G., Sarti L. (2008). A general and flexible model for the pedagogical description of learning objects. In M. Kendall, B. Samways (eds.). Proceedings of WCC 2008 - Learning to Live in the Knowledge Society. IFIP 20th World Computer Congress 2008 (Milano, 7-10 settembre 2008). Milano: Springer, pp. 55 – 62.

Alvino, S., Bocconi, S., Earp, J., Sarti, L. (2009a). Condivisione di risorse educative nella formazione docenti. TD-Tecnologie Didattiche. 46, pp.11-15.

Alvino S., Bocconi S., Boytchev P., Earp J., Sarti L. (2009b). Capturing the semantic foundations of an application domain: an ontology-based approach. In G. Adorni, M. Coccoli (eds.). Proceedings of IV Workshop of the AI*IA Working Group on Artificial Intelligence & E-Learning (Reggio Emilia, 12 Dicembre 2009), pp. 37-50.

Andersson R., Olsson A.K. (1999). Fields of education and training. EUROSTAT. http://epp.eurostat.ec .europa.eu/portal/page/portal/education/ introduction (ultima consultazione 12/03/2012).

Barra M., Negro A., Scarano V. (1999). When the teacher learns: a model for symmetric adaptivity. In P. Brusilovsky, P.D. Bra (eds.). Proceedings of II workshop on Adaptive Systems and User Modeling on the World Wide Web. (Toronto e Banff, Canada, 11 maggio e 23-24 giugno 1999). Computer Science Report. No. 99-07. Eindhoven: Eindhoven University of Technology, pp. 21-28.

Boytchev P., Bocconi S., Stefanov K. (2010). An ontological approach for multicultural digital repositories. In Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Software, Services & Semantic Technologies (S3T). (Varna, Bulgaria 11-12 settembre 2010). ISBN 978-954-9526-71-4. http://research.uni-sofia.bg/bitstream/10506/401/1/18- P.Boytchev_et_al_An_Ontological_Approach.pdf (ultima consultazione 12/03/2012).

Mizoguchi R., Sunagawa E., Kozaki K., Kitamura Y. (2007). A model of roles within an ontology development tool: HOZO. Journal of Applied Ontology, 2 (2), pp. 159-179.

Norvig P., Cohn D. (1997). Adaptive software. PC AI Magazine. 11 (1), pp. 27-30. http://norvig.com/adapaper-pcai.html (ultima consultazione 12/03/2012).