LLLI 2014 - Linked Learning meets LinkedUp: Learning and Education with the Web of Data

Building on the previous editions and its growing community, this workshop will provide a forum to discuss approaches making use of Web Data and related technologies, especially Linked Data, for teaching, learning and education. Distance teaching and openly available educational resources on the Web are becoming common practices with public higher education institutions as well as private training organisations realising the benefits of online resources. However, while research in educational technologies has been focusing on solving interoperability issues by creating a variety of metadata formats and environments for the exchange of educational resources, this has led to a very fragmented landscape of Web standards and approaches. Consequently, it is not only the case that interoperability between repositories of educational resources remains a challenge, but also that educational Web resources remain underexploited, as their connection, reuse and repurposing are barely supported by such technologies.
In the meantime, the Semantic Web has redefined itself throughout the last years as a Web of Linked Data. That was achieved by establishing principles that support sharing of large datasets on the Web together with a technology stack ? fundamentally based on the use of URIs, RDF, and SPARQL ? aimed at facilitating these principles. The huge success and widespread adoption of the Linked Data approach has led to the availability of vast amounts of public data such as DBpedia, WordNet RDF or the data.gov.uk initiative, ranging from domain-specific expert vocabularies to, for instance, data about cultural heritage (e.g., the Europeana dataset), which has the potential to fundamentally aid and transform the production, delivery and consumption of educational services and content. More recently, these approaches started to get adopted by education institutions, with Linked Data technologies being used to expose public information regarding course offerings, open educational resources and educational facilities in a readily accessible and reusable way. This has led to the creation of an embryonic “Web of Educational Data” including institutions such as the Open University (UK) or the National Research Council (Italy), as well as Linked Data about publicly available educational resources, such as the mEducator ? Linked Educational Resources. Initiatives such as LinkedEducation.org, LinkedUniversities.org and LinkedUp, all being inspired and driven by the initial Linked Learning community and efforts, have provided first efforts to bring together people and works in this area.
While the very nature of the Linked Data approach thus clearly offers promising solutions that can potentially transform education, adoption and take-up is still hindered by issues which are both technical as well interdisciplinary. Building on the success of Linked Learning editions (2011-2013), LILE2014 aims at addressing such challenges by providing a forum for researchers and practitioners who make innovative use of Linked Data for educational purposes, and to discuss, exchange and disseminate their work.
OBJECTIVES & TOPICS
The workshop aims to be a highly interactive research forum for exploring the promises of the Web of Linked Data in the broad area of learning by gathering researchers from the areas of the Semantic Web, Social Web, Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL), and Education. We will welcome high-quality papers about actual trends in (a) how education takes advantage of the Web of Data, especially through Linked Data technologies and (b) how Linked Data principles are being applied in educational contexts. We will seek application-oriented, as well as more theoretical papers and position papers in the following, non-exhaustive list of topics:
Linked data for informal learning and Web-based education
Using the Web of Data for personalisation and context-awareness in E-Learning
Usability and advanced user interfaces in learning environments and linked data
Light-weight educational metadata schemas
Exposing learning objects to the Web of Data
Semantic & syntactic mappings between educational metadata schemas
Controlled vocabularies, ontologies and terminologies for E-Learning
Schema.org and LRMI for annotating educational related Websites
Learning flows and designs with Semantic Web technologies
Linked data in learning analytics and educational data mining
Visual analytics of educational data
Linked data in organizational learning and learning organizations
Linked data for harmonizing individual learning goals and organizational objectives
Competency management with linked data
Collaborative learning on the Web of Data
Linked-data enhanced social learning