ENSEMBLE

Dr Anja Westram has joined the Ensemble project on a six-month visiting fellowship funded under the EU “Leonardo” Scheme.  With a background in molecular biology and psychology, Anja says “I recognised that interdisciplinary research in both fields could bridge the gap between the disciplines and enrich the knowledge in these fields beyond that gained in each discipline alone”.

With this in mind, the project provides an opportunity for Anja to bring together her biological knowledge with educational psychology and to gain valuable insights into the role of  innovative teaching tools.  Working with Patrick Carmichael at CARET and Keith Johnstone in the Department of Plant Sciences, she will carrying out scoping and prototyping of a development of a semantic web tool for teaching and learning about biochemical pathways.

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.

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.