ENSEMBLE

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.

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