Rob Koper of from the Educational
Technology Expertise Center at the Open University of the Netherlands makes a
very good point in his recent paper exploring the educational
potential of the Semantic Web (see Use of the
Semantic Web to Solve Some Basic Problems in Education).
Rob says:
"The usefulness of any technology in any field is dependent on
its capacity to address real problems and address practical
needs".
This encapsulates the vision of the eXe project.
We would like to develop a tool that will enable teachers and
lecturers to publish professional looking web content that
recognises the unique structural and presentational requirements of
educational content. Moreover, we would like to provide users with
the flexibility to generate their own “instructional devices”
without compromising the advantages of automatically recording of
the contextual structure of customised pedagogical
templates.
In this way we hope that the eXe project will
contribute to one of Rob’s aims associated with the Educational
Semantic Web, namely to help staff to perform “some of their tasks
in flexible and online educational settings more
efficiently”.
Rob provides an insightful summary of how
different technologies of the Semantic Web might add considerable
value to the generic objectives of education and are well worth
exploring – especially in the light of the pioneering work of the
Dutch Open University with Educational Modelling Language (EML) and
its subsequent inclusion into the IMS Learning
Design Specification.
While the eXe project is not directly focused on
the Learning Design Specification (as the project is more concerned
with the content packaging specification) we must recognise the
"educational semantic" of structured learning content. Consequently
the work of the Dutch Open University in this area is of great
interest for the eXe project.
