The EduOntoWiki Project for Supporting Social, Educational, and Knowledge Construction Processes with Semantic Web Paradigm

Abstract

The Web is going to produce a revolution in learning and teaching: the debate on the role of ICT in educational processes leads to a reconsideration of how we deal with information and knowledge. The widespread use in educational contexts is also due to the ease with which learning resources can be retrieved and shared: for example, the recent introduction of learning objects means that the contents which reside in different e-learning platforms is easy to find and access. But knowledge is also deeply embedded in millions of Web pages. Nonetheless, searching for information on the Web is not a simple task and the great number of documents found using search engines, such as Google, is beyond the human cognitive capacity to deal with this information overflow. Teaching information literacy skills or stimulating collaborative information filtering that supports the discovery of resources in a way that is responsive to the context of users may help, but there is a need for more efficient cognitive tools to search, organize, and discuss information in order to codify it in shared knowledge structures.