Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

April 23, 2012

Marakana – Open Source Training

Filed under: Education,Training,Video — Patrick Durusau @ 5:57 pm

Marakana – Open Source Training

From the homepage:

Marakana’s raison d’être is to help people get better at what they do professionally. We accomplish this by organizing software training courses (both public and private) as well as publishing learning resources, sharing knowledge from industry leaders, providing a place to share useful tidbits and supporting the community. Our focus is open source software.

I found this while watching scikit-learn – Machine Learning in Python – Astronomy, which was broadcast on Marakana TechTV.

From the Marakana TechTV homepage:

Marakana TechTV is an initiative to provide the world with free educational content on cutting-edge open source topics. Check out our work.

We work with open source communities to cover tech events world wide, as well as industry experts to create high quality informational videos from Marakana’s studio in downtown San Francisco.

…and we do it all at no charge. As an open source training company, Marakana believes in helping people get better at what they do, and through Marakana TechTV we’re able to engage open source communites around the globe, promote our training services, and stay current on the latest and greatest in open source.

Useful content and possibly a place to post educations videos. Such as on topic maps?

April 12, 2012

The Guide on the Side

Filed under: Education,Interface Research/Design — Patrick Durusau @ 7:05 pm

The Guide on the Side by Meredith Farkas.

From the post:

Many librarians have embraced the use of active learning in their teaching. Moving away from lectures and toward activities that get students using the skills they’re learning can lead to more meaningful learning experiences. It’s one thing to tell someone how to do something, but to have them actually do it themselves, with expert guidance, makes it much more likely that they’ll be able to do it later on their own.

Replicating that same “guide on the side” model online, however, has proven difficult. Librarians, like most instructors, have largely gone back to a lecture model of delivering instruction. Certainly it’s a great deal more difficult to develop active learning exercises, or even interactivity, in online instruction, but many of the tools and techniques that have been embraced by librarians for developing online tutorials and other learning objects do not allow students to practice what they’re learning while they’re learning. While some software for creating screencasts—video tutorials that film activity on one’s desktop—include the ability to create quizzes or interactive components, users can’t easily work with a library resource and watch a screencast at the same time.

In 2000, the reference desk staff at the University of Arizona was looking for an effective way to build web-based tutorials to embed in a class that had resulted in a lot of traffic at the reference desk. Not convinced of the efficacy of traditional tutorials to instruct students on using databases, the librarians “began using a more step-by-step approach where students were guided to perform specific searches and locate specific articles,” Instructional Services Librarian Leslie Sult told me. The students were then assessed on their ability to conduct searches in the specific resources assigned. Later, Sult, Mike Hagedon, and Justin Spargur of the library’s scholarly publishing and data management team, turned this early active learning tutorial model into Guide on the Side software.

Guide on the Side is an interface that allows librarians at all levels of technological skill to easily develop a tutorial that resides in an online box beside a live web page students can use. Students can read the instructions provided by the librarian while actively using a database, without needing to switch between screens. This allows students to use a database while still receiving expert guidance, much like they could in the classroom.

Meredith goes on to provide links to examples of such “Guide on the Side” resources and promises code to appear on GitHub early this summer.

This looks like a wonderful way to teach topic maps.

Comments/suggestions?

March 21, 2012

Topic Maps as Indexing Tools in the Educational Sphere:…

Filed under: Education,Topic Maps — Patrick Durusau @ 3:29 pm

Topic Maps as Indexing Tools in the Educational Sphere: Theoretical Foundations, Review of Empirical Research and Future Challenges by Vivek Venkatesh, Kamran Shaikh and Amna Zuberi.

Lars Marius Garshol sent a note concerning this chapter on education and topic maps (Appears in Cognitive Maps).

From the introduction:

Topic Maps (International Organization of Standardization [ISO 13250], 1999; 2002) are a form of indexing that describe the relationships between concepts within a domain of knowledge and link these concepts to descriptive resources. Topic maps are malleable – the concept and relationship creation process is dynamic and user-driven. In addition, topic maps are scalable and can hence be conjoined and merged. Perhaps, most impressively, topic maps provide a distinct separation between resources and concepts, thereby facilitating migration of the data models therein (Garshol, 2004).

Topic map technologies are extensively employed to navigate databases of information in the fields of medicine, military, and corporations. Many of these proprietary topic maps are machine-generated through the use of context-specific algorithms which read a corpus of text, and automatically produce a set of topics along with the relationships among them. However, there has been little, if any, research on how to use cognitive notions of mental models, knowledge representation and decision-making processes employed in problem-solving situations as a basis for the design of ontologies for topic maps.

This chapter will first outline the theoretical foundations in educational psychology and cognitive information retrieval that should underlie the development of ontologies that describe topic maps. The conjectural analyses presented will reveal how various modes of online interaction between key stakeholders (e.g., instructors, learners, content and graphical user interfaces), as well as the classic information processing model, mental models and related research on problem representation must be integrated into our current understanding of how the design of topic maps can better reflect the relationships between concepts in any given domain. Next, the chapter outlines a selective review of empirical research conducted on the use of topic maps in educational contexts, with a focus on learner perceptions and cognitions. Finally, the chapter provides comments on what the future holds for researchers who are committed to the development, implementation, and evaluation of topic map indexes in educational contexts.

A very useful review of what literature exists on topic maps in education is presented by this chapter. It is clear that much remains to be done to investigate the possible roles of topic maps in education.

Of particular interest is the suggestion that topic maps be used for learners to see themselves from multiple perspectives. An introspective use of topic maps as opposed to organization of knowledge external to ourselves.

February 28, 2012

Instruction Delivery

Filed under: Education,Teaching — Patrick Durusau @ 8:42 pm

It may just the materials I have encountered but here is how I would rate (highest to lowest) instruction delivery using the following methods:

  1. Interactive lecture/presentation
  2. Non-interactive lecture/presentation (think recorded CS lectures)
  3. Short non-interactive lectures plus online quizzes
  4. Webinars

I am not sure where pod/screencasts would fit into that ranking, probably between #2 and #3.

I suspect my feelings about webinars are colored by the appearance of corporate apparatchiks and fairly shallow technical content of those I have encountered.

Not all, some are quite good but that is like observing that PBS has good programming in apology for the 500 channels of trash on the local cable TV.

So it isn’t too narrow a question, what stands out for you as the most successful learning experiences you have had? What components or techniques seemed to make it so?

Can’t promise I will have the skill or talent to follow some or all of your suggestions but I am truly interested in what might make a successful learning experience. It will be for a fairly unique audience but every audience is unique in some way.

Any and all suggestions are deeply appreciated!

PS: And yes, to narrow the question or present the opportunity for more criticism, I will be venturing into the video realm in the near future.

February 13, 2012

MITx Experimental Course Announced

Filed under: CS Lectures,Education,MIT — Patrick Durusau @ 8:18 pm

MITx Experimental Course Announced by Sue Gee.

A free online course in electronics, the “prototype” for future courses being offered in MIT’s online curriculum, MITx, is now open for enrollment and will begin in March.

The first MITx course, 6.002x – Circuits and Electronics begins on March 5 and runs through till June 8. It is being taught by Anant Agarwal, Director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), with Gerald Sussman, professor of Electrical Engineering and CSAIL Research Scientist Piotr Mitros. An on-line adaption of 6.002, MIT’s undergraduate analog design course, it is designed to serve as a first course in an undergraduate electrical engineering (EE), or electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) curriculum.

As important at the course content itself this course will serve as the experimental prototype for MITx, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s new online learning initiative which offers classes free of charge to students worldwide.

I know topic maps are used in Norway’s educational system.

In what way would you use topic maps to enhance an online course such as this one?

One way to find out would be to take the course and explore the potential of topic maps to enrich the experience.

January 22, 2012

Construction of Learning Path Using Ant Colony Optimization from a Frequent Pattern Graph

Filed under: Authoring Topic Maps,Education,Graphs — Patrick Durusau @ 7:38 pm

Construction of Learning Path Using Ant Colony Optimization from a Frequent Pattern Graph by Souvik Sengupta, Sandipan Sahu and Ranjan Dasgupta.

Abstract:

In an e-Learning system a learner may come across multiple unknown terms, which are generally hyperlinked, while reading a text definition or theory on any topic. It becomes even harder when one tries to understand those unknown terms through further such links and they again find some new terms that have new links. As a consequence they get confused where to initiate from and what are the prerequisites. So it is very obvious for the learner to make a choice of what should be learnt before what. In this paper we have taken the data mining based frequent pattern graph model to define the association and sequencing between the words and then adopted the Ant Colony Optimization, an artificial intelligence approach, to derive a searching technique to obtain an efficient and optimized learning path to reach to a unknown term.

The phrase “multiple unknown terms, which are generally hyperlinked” is a good description of any location in a topic map for anyone other than its author and other experts in the field it describes.

Although couched in terms of a classroom educational setting, I suspect techniques very similar to these could be used with any topic map interface with users.

December 21, 2011

MIT launches online learning initiative

Filed under: Education — Patrick Durusau @ 7:21 pm

MIT launches online learning initiative

From the post:

MIT today announced the launch of an online learning initiative internally called “MITx.” MITx will offer a portfolio of MIT courses through an online interactive learning platform that will:

  • organize and present course material to enable students to learn at their own pace
  • feature interactivity, online laboratories and student-to-student communication
  • allow for the individual assessment of any student’s work and allow students who demonstrate their mastery of subjects to earn a certificate of completion awarded by MITx
  • operate on an open-source, scalable software infrastructure in order to make it continuously improving and readily available to other educational institutions.

MIT expects that this learning platform will enhance the educational experience of its on-campus students, offering them online tools that supplement and enrich their classroom and laboratory experiences. MIT also expects that MITx will eventually host a virtual community of millions of learners around the world.

You may also be interested in What is MITx?, an faq that accompanied the press release.

It would be interesting to see the framework they release to be used to host short courses/training on Lucene, Hadoop, R, bigdata(R), topic maps, etc.

December 17, 2011

P2PU

Filed under: Education,Marketing,Topic Maps — Patrick Durusau @ 7:53 pm

P2PU

From the website:

At P2PU, people work together to learn a particular topic by completing tasks, assessing individual and group work, and providing constructive feedback.

I just ran across the site today but was wondering if anyone else has used it or something similar? In order to grow the usage of topic maps, some sort of classes need to appear on a regular basis. Ones that are more widely available that graduate courses at some institutions.

Good idea? Bad idea? Comments?

December 10, 2011

Discover Knowledge Paths

Filed under: Education,Training — Patrick Durusau @ 8:05 pm

Discover Knowledge Paths

Have you seen the “Knowledge Paths” at IBM developerWorks?

I don’t know if it is “new” or if the logo next to a page where I was reading happened to catch my eye. Looking at the “paths” by their dates, it looks like early October 2011 when it was rolled out. Does anyone know differently?

It doesn’t look real promising at first but you have to drill down to find the goodies.

For example, I chose “Open Source Skills,” which lead to:

Open source development with Eclipse: Master the basics
Learn the basics and get started working with Eclipse, an extensible open source development platform.

OK, but it isn’t clear what I am about to find when I follow: “Open source development with Eclipse: Master the basics,”

1. Learn about the Eclipse platform
2. Install and use Eclipse
3. Migrate to Eclipse from other environments
4. Debug with Eclipse
5. Combine Eclipse with other tools

12 Reads, 8 Practice, 1 Watch, 1 Download.

IBM needs to distinguish this material from other developerWorks content, which are all great articles but this is supposed to be something different.

It could be as simple as:

Open source development with Eclipse: Master the basics
12 Reads, 8 Practice, 1 Watch, 1 Download

So the reader knows this isn’t your average read along with the author sort of resource.

And while I did not look at the others closely, consistency in presentation of the paths, that is all paths have read/practice/resources (or some other structure) so that readers have an expectation of the content between paths. Think of the Java paths that Sun pioneered as an example.

Oh, and do have someone review the naming of the paths. “Querying XML from Java Applications” and its description don’t mention XQuery at all. Something like: “XQuery: Bending Data (and XML) to Your Will” would be much better.

A good start that could become a lodestone for training materials for designers and engineers. Particularly if sufficient guidance is given on creation and maintenance of content to make it attractive for third party content developers.

An alternative to having to hunt down partial, dated and not always accurate guidance about open source projects from mailing lists and blogs.

October 4, 2011

Activity 1: Search for Meaning Using Topic Maps

Filed under: Education,Topic Maps — Patrick Durusau @ 7:54 pm

Activity 1: Search for Meaning Using Topic Maps

This is from:

Intro to US Writing: 9th Grade Writing/Physics Design Thinking Integrated Curriculum

.

I could not find contact information for the instructor on the blog so have contacted the school to see if I can get more information.

Encouraging example of topic maps being used in secondary education!

Definitely need to find out what the instructor did to make it successful.

October 3, 2011

What resources & practices (teaching Haskell) [or learning n]

Filed under: Education,Haskell,Teaching — Patrick Durusau @ 7:04 pm

What resources & practices (teaching Haskell)

Clifford Beshers answers (in part, the most important part):

I have two recommendations: teach them the simplest definitions of the fundamentals; read programs with them, out loud, like children’s books, skipping nothing.

The second one, reading aloud, is one that I have advocated for standards editors. Mostly because it helps you slow down and not “skim” text that you already “know.”

And the same technique can be applied for self-study of any subject, whether it is Haskell, some other programming language, mathematics, or some other domain.

October 1, 2011

Linked Data for Education and Technology-Enhanced Learning (TEL)

Filed under: Education,Linked Data,LOD — Patrick Durusau @ 8:27 pm

Linked Data for Education and Technology-Enhanced Learning (TEL)

From the website:

Interactive Learning Environments special issue on Linked Data for Education and Technology-Enhanced Learning (TEL)

IMPORTANT DATES
================

  • 30 November 2011: Paper submission deadline (11:59pm Hawaiian time)
  • 30 March 2012: Notification of first review round
  • 30 April 2012: Submission of major revisions
  • 15 July 2012: Notification of major revision reviews
  • 15 August 2012: Submission of minor revisions
  • 30 August 2012: Notification of acceptance
  • late 2012 : Publication

OVERVIEW
=========

While sharing of open learning and educational resources on the Web became common practice throughout the last years a large amount of research was dedicated to interoperability between educational repositories based on semantic technologies. However, although the Semantic Web has seen large-scale success in its recent incarnation as a Web of Linked Data, there is still only little adoption of the successful Linked Data principles in the domains of education and technology-enhanced learning (TEL). This special issue builds on the fundamental belief that the Linked Data approach has the potential to fulfill the TEL vision of Web-scale interoperability of educational resources as well as highly personalised and adaptive educational applications. The special issue solicits research contributions exploring the promises of the Web of Linked Data in TEL by gathering researchers from the areas of the Semantic Web and educational science and technology.

TOPICS OF INTEREST
=================

We welcome papers describing current trends on research in (a) how technology-enhaced learning approaches take advantage of Linked Data on the Web and (b) how Linked Data principles and semantic technologies are being applied in technology-ehnaced learning contexts. Both rather application-oriented as well as theoretical papers are welcome. Relevant topics include but are not limited to the following:

  • Using Linked Data to support interoperability of educational resources
  • Linked Data for informal learning
  • Personalisation and context-awareness in TEL
  • Usability and advanced user interfaces in learning environments and Linked Data
  • Light-weight TEL metadata schemas
  • Exposing learning object metadata via RDF/SPARQL & service-oriented approaches
  • Semantic & syntactic mappings between educational metadata schemas and standards
  • Controlled vocabularies, ontologies and terminologies for TEL
  • Personal & mobile learning environments and Linked Data
  • Learning flows and designs and Linked Data
  • Linked Data in (visual) learning analytics and educational data mining
  • Linked Data in organizational learning and learning organizations
  • Linked Data for harmonizing individual learning goals and organizational objectives
  • Competency management and Linked Data
  • Collaborative learning and Linked Data
  • Linked-data driven social networking collaborative learning

September 27, 2011

Faceted Search using Solr – what it is and what benefits does it provide..?

Filed under: Education,Facets,Solr — Patrick Durusau @ 6:47 pm

Faceted Search using Solr – what it is and what benefits does it provide..? by James Spencer (eduserv blog).

From the post:

What is Faceted Search?

Faceted search is a more advanced searching technology that enables the end user to structure their search and ultimately drill down using categories to find the end result they are looking for via the site search. Rather than relying on simple keyword searching, faceted searching allows a user to perform a keyword search but then filter content by pre-defined categories and filtering criteria.

Faceted searching also enables you to gain advanced funcionality like suggested search terms, auto completion on search terms and have associated links to content. This provides users with quicker, more flexible, dynamic and accurate search results.

The post goes on to list the benefits of faceted searching in a very accessible way, explains Solr, uses of Solr by the Department of Education (US), and gives additional examples of faceted searching.

Very high marks for presenting the material at a web developer/advanced user level. Hard to judge that consistently but this post comes as close as any I have seen recently.

April 29, 2011

Duolingo: The Next Chapter in Human Communication

Filed under: Crowd Sourcing,Data Mining,Education,Entity Resolution,Knowledge Capture,Subject Identity — Patrick Durusau @ 1:16 pm

Duolingo: The Next Chapter in Human Communication

By one of the co-inventors of CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA, Luis von Ahn, so his arguments should give us pause.

Luis wants to address the problem of translating the web into multiple languages.

Yes, you heard that right, translate the web into multiple languages.

Whatever you think now, watch the video and decide if you still feel the same way.

My question is how to adapt his techniques to subject identification?

December 19, 2010

ASPECT Vocabulary Bank for Education API

Filed under: Data Source,Education — Patrick Durusau @ 2:04 pm

ASPECT Vocabulary Bank for Education API

From the http://www.programmableweb.com website:

The ASPECT Vocabulary Bank for Education (VBE) provides both a browsable and searchable web application for users to locate, view and download terminology, as well as standards-based machine to machine interfaces. The VBE provides a range of multilingual, controlled lists relevant to learning in the EU, including those that are used to validate metadata profiles and a thesaurus used to describe educational topics. The RESTful API allows users to interface with the VBE.

The EU is a group that realizes not all users speak the same language.

November 26, 2010

The Data Science Venn Diagram – Post

Filed under: Data Mining,Education,Humor — Patrick Durusau @ 1:41 pm

The Data Science Venn Diagram by Drew Conway is a must see!

Not only is it amusing but a good way to judge the skill set needed for data science.

Balisage Contest:

Print this in color for Balisage next year.

Put diagrams on both sides of bulletin board.

Contestant and colleague have to mark the location of the contestant at the same time.

Results displayed to audience. 😉

Person who comes closest to matching the colleague’s evaluation wins a prize (to be determined).

June 16, 2010

Introducing George and Mary

Filed under: Education,Examples,Humor — Patrick Durusau @ 8:40 pm

George and Mary (Background).

Finally! The first installment in my introduction to topic maps for non-technical types arrives!

Suggestions for improving the dialogue, illustrations, etc., are most welcome!

It would be interesting if this could develop as a framework for explaining topic maps and their applicability in particular domains or to particular issues. By changing the problems confronted by George and Mary and adapting the dialogue.

This will not appeal to the “it can’t be funded unless 1) we don’t understand it, and 2) we suspect the applicant doesn’t either” crowd. Ask me if you are in that situation and we can translate a George and Mary story into complicated looking notation. With a light dusting of references to Peirce for good measure.

March 7, 2010

ERIC – A Resource For Topic Maps Design and Research

Filed under: Education,Thesaurus — Tags: , , , , — Patrick Durusau @ 8:05 pm

ERIC – Education Resources Information Center offers free access to > 1.3 million bibliographic records on education related materials. Thousands of new records are added every month.

Education is communication and I can’t think of a better general category for topic maps than communication. There is no one size fits all subject identification and no one way to communicate with all users. Clever use of resources found through ERIC may help avoid old mistakes so that we can make new ones.

The thesaurus feature of ERIC is very topic map like. Entries are indexed under a set of uniform “descriptors” so you can locate records indexed by subject, regardless of the terminology the author may have used. I should say that topic maps are very thesaurus like to be completely accurate.

The ERIC data and thesaurus are freely available. Exploring the “triggers” that lead to assignment of “descriptors,” creating rules for merging “descriptors” with similar mechanisms in other data sets, or the advantages of associations would make good topic map research projects. Education is a current topic of public concern and dare I say funding?

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