A Community oriented approach to delivering learning services

Abstract

In the past few years we have seen a growing interest in applying semantic web technologies to education. Much of this work has concentrated on the use of Learning Objects. This research is flawed in three ways: firstly, the notion of learning Objects(LOs) is deeply problematic, secondly, learners need more than ready access to pre-packaged fragments of knowledge, and, thirdly, a focus on LOs constrains the deployment of semantic web terminologies to the needs of providers and consumers of LOs. We propose an alternative approach which is not tied to LOs and which extends the use of semantic technologies as a means of providing learning services which are owned and created by a knowledge community.