News

13/06/2011 - BEST PAPER AWARD WINNER: "Using Linked Data to Reduce Learning Latency for e-Book Readers" by Julien Robinson, Johann Stan, Myriam Ribiere and [ paper ] [ slides ]

09/05/2011 - Tentative workshop schedule announced & CEUR workshop proceedings published.

14/02/2011 - New deadline (research papers): 14 March. Further details here.

17/02/2011 - Keynote by Vania Dimitrova on "Social Linked Data and Experimental Learning".

15/02/2011 - Selected papers will be invited to a Springer LNCS volume ("ESWC 2011 Workshop Highlights").

12/02/2011 - A special issue of Interactive Learning Environments will be dedicated to selected papers.

10/02/2011 - Best paper awards will be sponsored by mEducator.

Workshop

While sharing of educational resources on the Web became common practice throughout the last years, a large amount of research was dedicated to interoperable eLearning repositories based on semantic technologies. Data interoperability is even more crucial, since sharing of online resources at Web-scale is widely facilitated by established APIs, such as OAI-PMH or SQI. Moreover, adoption of social computing aspects within personalised learning environments has become a dominant paradigm building on principles such as user-centred identity management, service-orientation, and social participation. However, it remains an unresolved challenge to provide a meaningful, automated and personalized integration of diverse learning resources, e.g., formal and informal ones as found on the Web.

Though the eLearning area has brought up a number of comprehensive metadata standards (e.g., ADL SCORM, IEEE LOM, IMS LD) aiming at interoperability across eLearning environments, actual take-up is still fragmented. This can be attributed to their merely XML-driven approaches, the lack of established controlled vocabularies and the incompatibility of individual schemas. Several research efforts tried to address these issues by using Semantic Web technologies and ontology-based approaches. However, these efforts often failed to attract a critical mass of adopters. This is due to reasons such as inherent complexity, the lack of scalable and high-performance tool support when following complex reasoning-based approaches and the inavailibility of vocabularies when following proprietary representation schemes. In the meantime, the Semantic Web has redefined itself throughout the last years as a Web of “Linked Data” by establishing principles which support sharing of large datasets on the Web together with a technology stack (use of URIs, RDF, and SPARQL) aimed at their realisation. The huge success and widespread adoption of the Linked Data approach has lead to the availability of vast amounts of public data such as DBPedia, WordNet RDF or the data.gov.uk initiative.

While the Linked Data approach is not yet adopted widely within the eLearning domain, this workshop builds on the fundamental belief that it has the potential to fulfill the eLearning vision of Web-scale interoperability of eLearning resources and highly personalised and adaptive eLearning applications. The workshop aims to become a highly interactive research forum for exploring the promises of the Web of Linked Data in technology-enhanced learning by gathering researchers from the areas of the Semantic Web and technology-enhanced learning.