Topics

Semantic Web technologies appear to hold the promise of providing efficient support for learning and teaching in Higher Education (HE) institutions. Initially semantic technology adoption was hindered by issues such as ontology consensus, large-scale annotation of learning content and the underpinning pedagogy. However the emergence of Web 2.0 strategies for learning content annotation and linked data approaches to data integration seem to introduce a fresh and promising perspective.

There have been recent reports identifying the potential of semantic technologies and linked data in terms of addressing HE challenges. The emerging linked data movement appears to bring significant value in terms of interoperability, well-formedness of metadata, data integration, reasoning across resources and novel ways of collaboration and personalisation. In addition, innovative approaches that use semantic technologies for argumentation support and critical thinking are being developed.

There are opportunities and challenges in this emerging area of semantic technology adoption that this workshop wishes to address. In particular, the workshop will focus on the following themes:

The best papers will be invited to resubmit a journal paper version for a special issue of IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies, which is scheduled for publication in 2011