ENSEMBLE

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.

The Ensemble team has been joined by Agustina Martinez Garcia who will be working on the development of the technology platforms to be used by the project.  Agustina has recently completed a Masters degree at the University of Alcala de Henares and has worked on a range of web development projects for Atos Consulting in Spain.

Agustina says of the project: “I am looking forward to begin this new phase working on this exciting  project, surrounded by many professionals and experts in new technologies applied to the Educational field. This project brings a great opportunity to learn, research into and develop innovative tools to improve learning process.”

Agustina will initially be working with the Fedora digital repository and Mulgara triplestore to develop robust server-side support for the next set of teaching and learning applications to be developed by the project, as well as evaluating other semantic technologies, tools and platforms.

The Ensemble project held a well-attended and successful ‘user event’ at St John’s College, Cambridge on 8th January.  This involved members of the project team and its advisory group, members of participating departments at both Cambridge University and City University London, and representatives of other groups and organisations interested in collaborating with the project as it explores the potential of semantic technologies to enhance learning in higher education.

This group heard about work of the the project from Patrick Carmichael (Cambridge University) and Uma Patel (City University London)  They then had an opportunity to see demonstrations of the web applications built during the first months of the project and talk to the project team members and student researchers who developed them.  A lively discussion of how the semantic technologies on display might be used in different teaching and learning environments.

David Good, member of the project advisory group, summed up the discussions, highlighting how technological issues raised were underpinned by fundamental questions about teaching and learning.  Of particular interest and importance, he suggested, was the development of deep understanding of the role of cases in learning which would be necessary to respond to new curricular challenges and make the best use of new technologies.