Ontologies. Concept maps.

Thanks Ian, I mean How semantics (ontologies, concepts maps, etc) can be applied in curriculum management, and Why

They can be used to try to get some order of presentation of educational concepts, where new headings (topics) are not introduced without first explaining the underlying concepts!

Thanks Ian, but then we need kind of normative ontology that shows how topics are connected, what if the teachers or learning activity designers have different understandings of these new headings (topics)?

I think that we should distinguish at least between three functionally different kinds of ontologies:

1) ontologies (or, better description models) for classifying pedagogical content and media;

2) ontologies or models for producing courses and curricula (i.e. models of representing typical or useful syntagmatic structures of the textual genre "course", "courseware" or "curriculum");

and 3) ontologies for editing and publishing courses.

In all these three cases "semantics" (in order to use your expression) is totallly central:

* in the first case, you have to deal with semantics classifying and categorising;

* in the second case, you have to deal with the semantics of text or discours genres;

* in the third case, you have to deal with the semantics of multimedia information visualization and document organization ....

Peter,

Thank you for your detailed and valuable answer, however, which of these ontologies is more top-down and which are bottom-up?

I am asking these questions as having in mind the mapping of the normatives into the curriculum delivery and development.

may be we also should think of the social part and its influence in curriculum development through the discussion of meaning and emerging semantics, what do you think?

Mohammed,

Thank for your answer. The "ontological tripartition" that I have proposed you for your problem refers to a, in my opinion, very valuable research work of colleagues working at the "Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica" in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Please find below a link to one of their publications.

Indeed, they use a semantic-semiotic approach we also use here in Paris, in our "audiovisual research archive" program ( http://www.semiosphere.fr/) and of which a major issue is to separate description/indexing of digital resources (in our case: audiovisual resources), the publishing of described/indexes resources following publishing templates and, finally, the editing properly speaking (for the web, mobile devices,etc.).

So, I suppose that what you call a "normative ontology" is maybe a part of the ontology of defining publishing templates, i.e. in your case, of templates for pedagogical text genres. We can imagine that such an ontology recovers, among, other elements, discourse unit types (maybe further specialised in "Presentation", "Exemplification", "Test", etc.) and a set of relationships between two or more discourse unit types.

A specific pedagogical publishing model could be for instance, a "five step model" (a sort of general introduction to some subjects in the form of five "chapters"). The "passage" from one discours unit (one step) to another discours unit (another step) can be submitted to specific conditions that the learner has to respect (such as, for example: to obtain a certain number of points through a test, etc.).

The social part, indeed, is not included in this "tripartition" - and I completely agree with you that this aspect should be taken into account in to-day's curricula design.

Best regards Petter

http://oai.cwi.nl/oai/asset/11346/11346B.pdf

Dear Mohammad,

In re-reading my answer I have discovered a series of typing errors including our names - I apologize for this.

Peter

Peter,

Thank you for pointing this interesting research and no problem for the typos

I read the paper you mentioned and I was thinking in most of the time on the appropriateness of the so called "structured progression" approach to match the emerging semantics form the curriculum delivery with the curriculum normatives and the domain specific ontologies.

however, the challenge in my opinion lies in the process of mapping the matching process into association rules, and this requires innovative research to map assessments methods (and their criteria) into association rules for meaningful retrieval. This problem I need to investigate further and I will be thankful to receive your comments and suggestions with this regard. any research and references are welcome as well.

Thank you again Peter and looking forward for your comments.

Semantics, concept development, classification and database development are integral to all learning. For example, access www.nlinks.org and then click on the pain practice and education database button in the left margin or directly access

http://www.nlinks.org/Pain-Practice/Education-Database/

See how health information technology and health professional (nursing ) standards merge in the development of a professional information website on pain management practice and .education. This website represents a learning experience for the developers as well as a learning resource for health professionals, especially nurses, and a model for how categorization of content facilitates understanding.

Hi Xavier,

I would be interested in knowing how this kind of approach works in your field.

@Mary

Thank you for your answer and for mentioning this example.

I have checked it roughly and there was kind or peer-evaluation to select which resources to be selected and linked to the standards and then to be delivered, "Only web pages that received an average accuracy score of four or greater were included in this webpage. Their corresponding overall average score determined their ranking within each nursing practice standard". Is this similar to the mapping of normatives into curriculum and courses.

in this example which role semantics play, is it in the representation of the nursing practice standards, or the representation of content or both?

to what extent this process of linking nurses practices and nursing practice standards could be automated to form meaningful material? (much potential semantics here)