The semantic web intends to facilitate web-based content to be understandable and reusable by human and machines. Ontologies is a major component of the semantic web where categorization of a shared conceptualization of a specific domain is represented. Formal taxonomies and rules are likely to play a major role in enabling the shared and re-usable learning content. It is predicted that the Semantic Web and ontologies will have a big influence on the next phases of e-learning!
Devedzic (as cited in Laytras, Wagner & Diaz, 2004), claims that the key advantages of integrating Web Intelligence in Artificial Intelligence in Education are improved adaptation, better learning reassurance by providing the learner the most up-to-date web content, and course sequencing.
Aroyo and Dicheva in their paper “The New Challenges for E-learning: The Educational Semantic Web” (as cited in Laytras, Wagner & Diaz, 2004)suggest a framework for Educational Semantic Web – a modular semantic-driven and service-based interoperability framework plus ontology driven tools. All this for a user friendly, ordered, and automated authoring web-based educational systems. Indeed, to offer a balance between making use of explicit semantic information and exchanging educational information and also to keep up the information semantics.
Henze, Dolog & Nejdl in the paper “Reasoning and Ontologies for Personalized E-Learning in the Semantic web” (as cited in Laytras, Wagner & Diaz, 2004), also suggest a framework for personalized learning content and show how the semantic web can facilitate automatic generation of hypermedia structures.
As you can see various researchers have showed that the semantic web and ontology-based tools can facilitate education for our students; catering for all the abilities we find in today’s classrooms, since everyone have make use of the personalized learning content on the web.
References:
Sampson, D. G., Lytras, M. D., Wagner, G., & Diaz, P. (2004). Ontologies and the Semantic Web for E-learning. Educational Technology & Society, 7(4), 26-28. Retrieved January 12, 2011 from http://alexandria.tue.nl/openaccess/Metis172208.pdf
I think that the future directions in which e-Learning is moving, is from a standardised one-size fits all to a personalised learning approach, where the machine intelligence contributes to harvesting and filtering the information which is available out there and making it available in the right 'package' to the individual learner.
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