Semantic web technologies for education – time for a ‘turn to practice’?

Abstract

In this synoptic paper, the authors describe how the transformative potential of semantic web and linked web of data technologies for educational systems has been identified, but highlight the fact that there are few accounts of the pedagogical applications of these same technologies. The papers in this special issue provide accounts of these technologies in use in teaching, learning and curriculum development in higher education. Several of the papers suggest that these new web technologies have important roles to play in changing pedagogical practices in higher education settings in which teachers and students are seen as designers of their own learning technologies and as producers of new knowledge. The authors argue that the theorisation, development and adoption of Semantic Web and linked data technologies would be well served by a ‘turn to practice’ and a focus not on learning technologies in higher education but on the meaning-making practices, discourses and controversies around technologies in higher education.

Keywords:

• semantic technologies
• linked data
• higher education
• emerging technologies
• practice turn

Acknowledgements

Many of the ideas developed in this introductory piece have emerged in the course of the work of the ‘Ensemble’ project: (‘Ensemble: Semantic Technologies for the Enhancement of Case Based Learning’), a project of the ESRC-EPSRC Technology Enhanced Learning Programme (Grant RES-139-25-0403A); full details are available on the project website at http://www.ensemble.ac.uk/ and the programme website is at http://www.tel.ac.uk/. The editors would like to acknowledge the contributions of the extended project team, its steering group and the many and varied participants in the project. We would also like to thank the editorial board of Technology, Pedagogy and Education for the chance to produce yet another special issue of a journal devoted to the Semantic Web, and the authors and reviewers of the papers, for their willing engagement in an extended discussion which has contributed both to this introductory paper and to what we hope readers will find an interesting and thought-provoking special issue.

Notes

1. We use the capitalised ‘Semantic Web’ to refer to the broad vision of a future version of the current World Wide Web; and the lower case ‘semantic web’ when referring to the specific technologies and approaches that it involves.

2. Triplestores are semantic databases which represent data as a directed graph of subject-predicate-object ‘triples’ and they are optimised for the retrieval of such triples, usually in RDF (Resource Definition Format). Other elements such as relationships, metadata records, rules, and taxonomies can also be represented in triplestores, alongside data.

3. Nowak (2009) presented a visually appealing comparison of the Semantic Web ‘technology stack’ (so complex it has to be represented in three dimensions) with the much more limited ‘Linked Web of Data’ beside it, a fraction of the former’s size and complexity.

4. A good example of this is the popular blog site and application framework, Wordpress (http://www.wordpress.com), which, while ostensibly a ‘Web 2.0’ application, also allows the export of content as linked data along with well-structured metadata and supports a variety of semantic web technology extensions to enable ‘enhanced publication’ (Tatum, 2011), even if these features are as yet used by only a minority of its users.