ENSEMBLE

The Ensemble Project was represented at the inaugural workshop of SemHE (Semantic Web Applications for Teaching and Learning Support in Higher Education), at the EC-TEL conference in Nice on September 30th 2009.  This brought together researchers and developers from nine countries.

Members of the Ensemble project team presented two papers:

• Patrick Carmichael and Agustina Martinez Garcia. Semantic Technologies to Support Teaching and Learning with Cases: Challenges and Opportunities
• Michael Tscholl, Frances Tracy and Patrick Carmichael. Case Methods, Pedagogical Innovation and Semantic Technologies

There was also a display of posters from the project showing work in progress and pilot projects.

For full details of SemHE see the website at: http://www.semhe.org

There is a report of the workshop at: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/about/news/2752

Agustina Martinez presented a paper describing the work of the project at the Open Repositories Conference in Atlanta, Georgia.  In her paper “The Ensemble Project: Using Fedora to Support the Development of the Semantic Web for Education”, she described how the project was using the Fedora Digital Repository and Mulgara Triplestore to allow teachers and learners to gain direct access to data and incorporate it into teaching and learning applications.

Agustina reported from the conference: “This year the main theme of the conference has been the merger between the two biggest repository communities, Fedora and Dspace, creating the new  “Duraspace” organization, which plans to maintain, for the moment, separate developments of both repositories, but will also develop new technologies and services that respond to  new requirements from existing and future users. The conference has been a good place to share experiences with people from other universities and disciplines, to find out on what others are working and to get new ideas for future developments.”

The Ensemble Project’s Fedora Repository and associated Mulgara Semantic Triplestore had their first public outing at a lunchtime seminar for staff at the UK Data Archive, University of Essex.  Patrick Carmichael, and Louise Corti presented an overview of the project and Agustina Martinez Garcia demonstrated how an appropriately constructed digital repository could serve both data and metadata to web applications.

Agustina showed how large data sets could be accessed, ‘rules’ applied and the results could then be presented using the visualisation tools developed by the SIMILE project at MIT.

The illustration shows how data from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) can be viewed using the SIMILE ‘Exhibit’ Tool and its Google Map element. Users can select observations of plants and use these as the starting points of further investigations, queries and hypothesis formulation.

Patrick Carmichael, Ensemble Project Director, explained: “these developments  mark an important move forward for the project: they enable us to deal with much larger data sets then previously, which will allow teachers and learners to engage with real data rather than small exemplary collections.  Supporting this kind of authentic learning is an important component of the case based approaches we are finding in the research settings in which we are working.”

Dr Isabel Solano Ferandez and Maria del Mar Sanchez Vera from GITE, the Grupo de Investigación de  Tecnología Educativa, at the Universidad de Murcia visited CARET this week. They spent time working with members of the Ensemble team and other CARET projects, discussing current activities and opportunities for future collaboration.

Isabel and Malle presented their work at a weekly seminar of the CARET Evaluation Group. Isabel discussed the role of GITE in general, Malle described her doctoral research on the evaluation of the OeLe e-assessment system, which uses semantic technologies to provide ontology-driven assessment of student writing in exams. This provoked a lively discussion about the potential for e-assessment in the poorly defined, complex and contested knowledge domains being explored by the Ensemble project.