Enriching the Web of Data with Educational Information Using We-Share

Adolfo Ruiz-Calleja,Eduardo Gómez-Sánchez,Miguel Luis Bote-Lorenzo,Juan Ignacio Asensio-Pérez,Guillermo Vega-Gorgojo,Carlos Alario-Hoyos

doi:10.19173/irrodl.v18i1.2633

Abstract

<p class="3">This paper presents We-Share, a social annotation application that enables educators to publish and retrieve information about educational ICT tools. As a distinctive characteristic, We-Share provides educators data about educational tools already available on the Web of Data while allowing them to enrich such data with their experience using technology in the classroom. We-Share evaluation entails an empirical study where 23 educators enriched tool descriptions available on the Web of Data out of their own experience. The results suggest that experiential annotations published by educators using We-Share improve the satisfaction and confidence of other educators when discovering and selecting ICT tools. Further, most educators found We-Share an easy-to-use application suitable to share and retrieve information about educational ICT tools.</p>

Highlights

One of the problems that educators need to face when designing a technology-enhanced learning situation is the selection of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) tools (“tools“ hereinafter) to support it
SEEK-AT-WD currently exposes more than 7000 different tool descriptions that could be exploited by educational search systems
This paper proposed We-Share, an application that allows educators to publish, annotate, and retrieve tool descriptions available on the Web of Data by making use of the SEEK-AT-WD infrastructure

Summary

Introduction

One of the problems that educators need to face when designing a technology-enhanced learning situation is the selection of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) tools (“tools“ hereinafter) to support it. As several educators typically employ search systems in order to be informed about the tools available (Conole, 2008; Madden, Ford, & Miller, 2005), several tool search systems have been proposed for them to find this information (e.g., Cool Tools For Schools) The precision of these search system is higher than general-purpose ones (e.g., Google) because they focus on a specific domain; they suffer from common data sustainability problems that limit their utility (Ruiz-Calleja, VegaGorgojo, Asensio-Pérez, Bote-Lorenzo, Gómez-Sánchez, & Alario-Hoyos, 2012): the isolation of their datasets, which increases the overall effort required to sustain them; and the well-known cold-start. The resulting dataset will be automatically updated from noneducational data sources and, at the same time, it will contain education-specific information published by its community of users

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Conclusion