ENSEMBLE

The Ensemble Project will present its plans, development work and early findings in a symposium at the international Computer Assisted Learning Conference to be held in Brighton in March 2009.

An initial overview of the project and some of the emerging issues and themes will be followed by presentations of four of the demonstrators developed during the Pilot Phase of the project (Summer 2008).  These include examples drawn from across disciplines and demonstrate different applications of semantic technologies.

Participants in the symposium will have an opportunity to engage in discussions with the presenters in a ’round-table’ format which will be further supported by a poster display.  Rather than having a formal discussant role, a chaired ‘panel discussion’ will allow participants to offer responses to the presentations.  We intend that this session will initiate a continuing dialogue about the potential, nature and scope of ‘Web 3.0′ to enhance teaching and learning.

A new tool has been added to the Ensemble projects page. This page is based on the Molecule of the Month series from the Protein Data Bank. It demonstrates how information can be dynamically integrated from the Protein Data Bank – an online repository of structural information about large biological molecules – to create 2D and 3D renderings of molecular structures, using Exhibit and Jmol, a java-based 3D chemical structure viewer. The tool can also search the scientific literature via Pubmed for recent articles related to proteins of interest.

At present, it is best viewed using Firefox.

Molecule of the Month from the Protein Data Bank

The Ensemble Project features in the newly published TLRP Commentary ‘Education 2.0? Designing the web for teaching and learning’.  This is the tenth in a series of TLRP Commentaries designed to make research-informed contributions to contemporary discussion of issues, initiatives or events in UK education.

The section of the commentary on the semantic web highlights the work of the project in assessing the potential for semantic technologies to allow teachers to illustrate teaching resources with data drawn from across the web, and to engage students in problem formulation and hypothesis testing, bringing authentic data into teaching and learning environments.

You can download the commentary from the TLRP Website at: http://www.tlrp.org/pub/commentaries.html

The first major public output of the Ensemble pilot projects (coinciding with the official launch of the main project on 1st October) is the Plant Evolution Timeline.  This was developed as part of the pilot work of the project by Ben Roberts and Nicola Peart at CARET with support and feedback from members of the University of Cambridge Department of Plant Sciences.

This tool is designed primarily to aid Plant Scientists studying at the University of Cambridge with their learning of plant evolution. The tool is used to provide an overview of course content and major themes for 1^st and 3^rd year students during the first few lectures of their courses, and will also be suitable for use within small group supervisions and for revision purposes. The public version of the timeline offers all of the interactive features but does not link to the specific lecture content of the Cambridge courses.

Nicola Peart, one of the team responsible for the development of the Timeline, describes how:”[the timeline] is useful for helping students assemble a large range of data sources at a range of scales and relevance. It is also useful for teachers illustrating links between data that are difficult to visualise without a tool like this. It is also [helps] researchers to see how different people might draw connections between data, or to inspire further research into variables that may or may not correlate.”

The timeline itself is produced using a modified version of the Timeplot tool developed as part of the SIMILE project at MIT, together with some site-specific Javascript and PHP scripting to handle authentication.  There are instructions and links to other related resources.

The Plant Evolution Timeline