– collocated with WWW2015, 19 May, Florence, Italy –
Building on the previous editions and its growing community, this workshop will provide a forum to discuss approaches making use of Web Data and related technologies, especially Linked Data, for teaching, learning and education. Distance teaching and openly available educational resources on the Web are becoming common practices with public higher education institutions as well as private training organisations realising the benefits of online resources. However, due to the very fragmented landscape of schemas, vocabularies and interface techniques, it is not only the case that interoperability between repositories of educational resources remains a challenge, but also that educational Web resources remain underexploited.
On the other hand, the widespread adoption of Linked Data and derivations, such as Microformats, has led to the availability of vast amounts of public data a such as DBpedia, WordNet RDF or the data.gov.uk initiative, ranging from domain-specific expert vocabularies to, for instance, data about cultural heritage (e.g., the Europeana dataset), which has the potential to fundamentally aid and transform the production, delivery and consumption of educational services and content. More recently, these approaches started to get adopted by education institutions, with Linked Data technologies being used to expose public information regarding course offerings, open educational resources and educational facilities in a readily accessible and reusable way. This has led to the creation of an embryonic “Web of Educational Data” including institutions such as the Open University (UK) or the National Research Council (Italy), as well as Linked Data about publicly available educational resources, such as the mEducator – Linked Educational Resources. Initiatives such as LinkedEducation.org, LinkedUniversities.org and LinkedUp, all being inspired and driven by the initial Linked Learning community and efforts, have provided first efforts to bring together people and works in this area.
However, widespread take-up of such approaches is still hindered by issues which are both technical as well interdisciplinary. Building on the success of previous editions (LILE 2011-2014), LILE2015 aims at addressing such challenges by providing a forum for researchers and practitioners who make innovative use of Linked Data for educational purposes, and to discuss, exchange and disseminate their work. Building on the strong collaboration with LinkedUp in earlier years, LILE2015 will also feature an open data competition which will continue the efforts of the LinkedUp Challenge.
#LILE2015 