Re: MOOCs, crowdsourcing and Berners-Lee's vision

Hi Soren, all,
As I understand it, Slidewiki lets professors collaborate on content
production for courses. When I asked my question on the list, I had a
different user base in mind: students. In most big MOOCs right now,
students organise themselves spontaneously and start typing up the notes of
the professor, write glossaries, etc. They usually do that via a wiki, and
many professors report that the notes there end up more polished than their
own. I am convinced that these same students could also semantically
annotate these notes, if offered proper tools. I see three reasons why they
would do it:
1) they understand this is useful for semantic web goals (citizen
science-style)
2) just doing it helps the participant to study the material
3) if additional services can be offered, they might find it useful for
themselves and their peers (cheat sheet of definitions, for instance, or
flash cards)

It is really hard to overemphasise the dedication of some students in those
courses, I really think this could attract lots of users quickly. Coursera
for instance just set up a global translator network of volunteers, to
handle all the translations.

If a tool is implemented, and implemented in the right way (for instance
via LTI standard), it could be hooked up right away with Coursera and
edx.org, collecting approximately 10M potential users. edx, via its XBlock
API, would actually be the easiest way to reach the most students as a tool
could be integrated more tightly in the platform.

Bear in mind also that these annotations would apply for content that is
typically more specialized than what is found on wikipedia.

Anyone interested in this? Any existing semantic tools to recommend as a
good starting point?

Thanks,

Paul


Paul-Olivier Dehaye
SNF Professor of Mathematics
University of Zurich
skype: lokami_lokami (preferred)
phone: +41 76 407 57 96
chat: paulolivier@gmail.com
twitter: podehaye
freenode irc: pdehaye


On Wed, May 14, 2014 at 1:44 PM, Paul-Olivier Dehaye <
paul-olivier.dehaye@math.uzh.ch> wrote:

> Thank you, that is relevant. Any others, maybe introducing semantic games
> in MOOCs?
> Paul
>
> Paul-Olivier Dehaye
> skype: lokami_lokami (preferred)
> phone: +41 76 407 57 96
> chat: paulolivier@gmail.com
> twitter: podehaye
> freenode irc: pdehaye
>
>
> On Tue, May 13, 2014 at 10:15 AM, Sören Auer <
> auer@informatik.uni-leipzig.de> wrote:
>
>> Dear Paul-Olivier, all,
>>
>> I'm not exactly sure, what you have in mind, but maybe our SlideWiki.org
>> initiative is related:
>>
>> With the open-courseware authoring platform SlideWiki.org, we aim to
>> facilitate the collaborative creation of hightly structured
>> multi-lingual courseware (consiting of slides organized in reusable
>> decks, self-assessment questions, figures etc.) which could be used to
>> create MOOCs. See http://slidewiki.org/documentation/
>>
>> We use SlideWiki for a number of courses, e.g. a lecture series on
>> Semantic Web topics:
>>
>> http://slidewiki.org/deck/750
>>
>> BTW: We are currently running the SlideWiki OpenCourseWare Summer
>> (SOS2014) Competition, which will award good Open Course Ware projects
>> on SlideWiki:
>>
>>
>> http://education.okfn.org/slidewiki-opencourseware-summer-sos2014-competition/
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> Sören
>>
>> On 5/12/2014 9:53 PM, Paul-Olivier Dehaye wrote:
>> > Hello,
>> >
>> > I was wondering if anyone here has started thinking about or acting on
>> > opportunities for semantic web research when combining the emerging
>> > ideas of crowdsourcing and MOOcs.
>> >
>> > Paul-Olivier Dehaye
>> > skype: lokami_lokami (preferred)
>> > phone: +41 76 407 57 96
>> > chat: paulolivier@gmail.com <mailto:paulolivier@gmail.com>
>> > twitter: podehaye
>> > freenode irc: pdehaye
>>
>>
>>
>