Exposing Social Data as Linked Data in Education

1.1. Social Data for Technology Enhanced Learning

In the early days of what is now called the era of Web 1.0, the social component of online learning was largely missing. Delivery over the Internet was mostly restricted to serving content to users. This situation changed with the emergence of Web 2.0 and the creation of social and sharing networks (Greenhow & Askari, 2017). Through Web 2.0 and cloud based services, a wealth of social interactions is now possible which allows and facilitates the creation of peer-to-peer learning networks, i.e. connections between learners to co-create, share, reuse, and edit resources or engage in discussions online (Hsieh, 2017), and even massive online learning communities like MOOCs or virtual worlds, (Veletsianos, Collier, & Schneider, 2015). These networks are aiming to maximise the social interaction in technology enhanced learning (TEL) with technical and pedagogic designs that are equipped with a great variety of different tools (Waight & Abd-El-Khalick, 2018; Sloep et al., 2012).