Participants will be able to find out about semantic and ‘linked-data’ technologies, as well as about the . . . → Read More: CAL Ensemble Workshop: A Semantic Web App in a Day!]]> The Ensemble Project is running an invited one-day workshop entitled “A Semantic Web App in a Day” at this year’s Computer Assisted Learning (CAL) Conference.  The workshop is on the 14th April 2011, at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Participants will be able to find out about semantic and ‘linked-data’ technologies, as well as about the work of the project.  They will then be able to build a semantic web application of their own, much as project participants have been able to, using the SIMILE Exhibit Web Application Framework.

This booklet, produced by the project as an introduction to the ‘Exhibit’, will be used during the workshop and the Ensemble team will provide further guidance to participants who want to take their work forward.

Workshop Outline

Morning Session

• The ‘Semantic Web’, ‘Semantic Technologies’ and the ‘Linked Web of Data’ in Education’
• About the Ensemble Project: Exploring Semantic Technologies in Case based Learning
• A ‘Work through’ case study: How we are supporting teaching and learning in Education Studies using the SIMILE toolkit and other semantic technologies
• Fresh from the Ensemble Labs!  First glimpses of some of our new tools and prototypes

Afternoon Session

• From Data to Web Application: Rapid prototyping with the Exhibit Web Application Framework and Ensemble project tools, supported by members of the project
• Review and Next Steps
• Show and Tell: with prizes for different categories of rapid prototypes!

For further information about CAL 2011 and to register (day registration is possible), visit the CAL site at: http://www.cal-conference.elsevier.com/

Fran will continue . . . → Read More: An Arrival and a (sort of) Departure]]> Congratulations to Dr Frances (Fran) Tracy, who has been a researcher on the Ensemble project since the outset, and who has been appointed to the Post of Senior Lecturer in Education Studies at Liverpool John Moores University, where she had been working since moving from CARET in Cambridge in October 2010.

Fran will continue to work with the Ensemble project and will now be using some of the semantic web technologies the project has developed in her own teaching.

Her role on the project has been filled by Dr Kate Litherland.  Kate has a background in Italian Studies and has been working on a range of e-Learning and Student Induction projects.  She has already been working with the project in one of its ‘partner sites’ in the Faculty of Business and Law at LJMU and will now be working with teachers and students across the project settings at Liverpool John Moores University.

Wooranna Park Primary School in Melbourne has become a focus of attention for architects and educators in the UK who . . . → Read More: Rob Walker visits Swinburne University of Technology]]> Rob Walker was a visiting scholar at Swinburne University of Technology, School of Design during October 2010, as part of his ongoing work on designing spaces for education.

Environments for Technology Enhanced Learning

Wooranna Park Primary School in Melbourne has become a focus of attention for architects and educators in the UK who are involved in the design of classrooms and schools.

Over a period of more than twelve years, the school has been the site for a collaboration between teachers and designers, who have all been influenced by the educational ideas developed by the schools of Reggio Emilia in Italy. This is not a conventional one-off building project, the designer, Mary Featherston, has worked with the school from the start on a series of projects adapting conventional buildings in response to the implementation of an evolving pedagogy.

In an early design phase, groups of children made site visits to settings which included a science museum, a radio station, a graphic design practice and a furniture designer/maker. These visits led to important principles for the redesign of their classrooms – which are set up to integrate computing and other technologies, provide spaces for different groupings and support different kinds of educational tasks.

The school has been the subject of several research studies and is currently being developed as a case study by Ensemble. The aim is to provide an exemplar and a set of semantic tools which can be used by Educational Studies in supporting student projects. There is also interest from students in other areas – in Design and in Social Science.

Last week saw the latest seminar day presented by the Ensemble Project, on the topic of ‘Socio-material and Posthuman Readings of Digital Learning’. On Friday 17th September, Liverpool John Moores University welcomed Estrid Sorensen (Ruhr University, Berlin) and Sian Bayne (Edinburgh). The event was chaired by Richard Edwards and included presentations . . . → Read More: Socio-material and Posthuman Readings of Digital Learning]]>

Estrid Sorensen

Last week saw the latest seminar day presented by the Ensemble Project, on the topic of ‘Socio-material and Posthuman Readings of Digital Learning’. On Friday 17th September, Liverpool John Moores University welcomed Estrid Sorensen (Ruhr University, Berlin) and Sian Bayne (Edinburgh). The event was chaired by Richard Edwards and included presentations on project perspectives from Michael Tscholl, Sanna Rimpilainen and Katy Jordan.

Click to download the event programme as a PDF

Read more

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The project, building on the work of Ensemble, will investigate learning and the use of technologies in the remaking of professional . . . → Read More: New project: Remaking Practices]]> Recently, we learnt of the success of the Australian Research Council Linkage application for a 3 year research project ‘Remaking practices: learning to meet the challenge of practice change in primary health care’.

The project, building on the work of Ensemble, will investigate learning and the use of technologies in the remaking of professional practices in new models of health care. It is a collaborative project with the HealthOne program in the NSW Department of Health. HealthOne is an integrated primary and community health initiative that brings together GPs, community health and other health professionals in multidisciplinary teams. The HealthOne policy expectation is that the services will be multi-disciplinary, integrated across professional, agency and sectoral boundaries, and developed in an active partnership with health consumers and communities.

Click here to read the full project outline.

Patrick presented a set of ‘use cases’ drawn from Ensemble project . . . → Read More: ‘Future of Exhibit’ meeting in Washington DC]]> Patrick visited Washington DC for a meeting to discuss the future directions for the SIMILE Exhibit web application framework. This brought together members of the MIT/SIMILE team, the Library of Congress, and other key Semantic Web players such as Talis, MetaWeb and Zepheira.

Patrick presented a set of ‘use cases’ drawn from Ensemble project research and development work.

Broadly, the requirements for the ‘New Exhibit’ include:

• Scalability to allow much larger data sets to be handled and presented
• Local Editing of Exhibit content
• Improved Embedding into other applications
• Persistence, so that the ‘state’ of an application can be saved and reproduced
• Extensibility to support the development of new facets, visualisation tools and data presentation