The main purpose of this paper is to present the importance of Interactive Learning Objects (ILO) to improve the teaching-learning process by assuring a constant interaction among teachers and students, which in turn, allows students to be constantly supported by the teacher. The paper describes the ontology that defines the ILO available on the…

Sixteen scholarly papers and twenty abstracts comprise the content of the eighteenth annual Brick & Click Libraries Conference, held annually at Northwest Missouri State University in Maryville, Missouri. The proceedings, authored by academic librarians and presented at the conference, portray the contemporary and future face of librarianship.…

Purpose: This paper aims to present the semantic content identifier (SCI), a permanent identifier, computed through a linear-time onion-peeling algorithm that enables the extraction of semantic features from a text, and the integration of this information within the permanent identifier. Design/methodology/approach: The authors employ SCI to…

Today's technology-enhanced learning practices cater to students and teachers who use many different learning tools and environments and are used to a paradigm of interaction derived from open, ubiquitous, and socially oriented services. In this context, a crucial issue for education systems in general, and for Intelligent Learning Environments…

Significant economies can be achieved in distributed learning systems architected with a focus on interoperability and reuse. The key building blocks of an efficient distributed learning architecture are the use of standards and XML technologies. The goal of plug and play capability among various components of a distributed learning system…

Edutella is an RDF-based E-Learning P2P network that is aimed to accommodate heterogeneous learning resource metadata repositories in a P2P manner and further facilitate the exchange of metadata between these repositories based on RDF. Whereas Edutella provides RDF metadata repositories with a quite natural integration approach, XML metadata…

Reports on Web keyword searching, metadata, Dublin Core, Extensible Markup Language (XML), metasearch engines (metasearch engines search several Web indexes and/or directories and/or Usenet and/or specific Web sites), and the Year 2000 (Y2K) dilemma, all topics discussed at the second annual Internet Librarian Conference sponsored by Information…

Focusing on languages for the Dublin Core, examines the experience of some related ways to seek semantic interoperability through simplicity: planned languages, interlingua constructs, and pidgins. Also defines the conceptual and organizational problem of maintaining a metadata standard in multiple languages. (AEF)

The big question for many researchers in the area of educational systems now is what is the next step in the evolution of e-learning? Are we finally moving from a scattered intelligence to a coherent space of collaborative intelligence? How close we are to the vision of the Educational Semantic Web and what do we need to do in order to realize it?…

In this article, an extension of the existing structure of learning objects is described. The solution addresses the problem of the access and discovery of educational resources in the distributed Internet environment. An overview of e-learning standards, reference models, and problems with educational resources delivery is presented. The paper…

Semantic Web and Adaptive Hypermedia come from different backgrounds, but it turns out that actually, they can benefit from each other, and that their confluence can lead to synergistic effects. This encounter can influence several fields, among which an important one is Education. This paper presents an analysis of this encounter, first from a…

The challenge of the semantic web is the provision of distributed information with well-defined meaning, understandable for different parties. Particularly, applications should be able to provide individually optimized access to information by taking the individual needs and requirements of the users into account. In this paper we propose a…

Learning Objects Metadata (LOM) aims at describing educational resources in order to allow better reusability and retrieval. In this article we show how additional inference rules allows us to derive additional metadata from existing ones. Additionally, using these rules as integrity constraints helps us to define the constraints on LOM elements,…

This paper presents a reference framework to describe educational material. It introduces the PALO Language as a cognitive based approach to Educational Modeling Languages (EML). In accordance with recent trends for reusability and interoperability in Learning Technologies, EML constitutes an evolution of the current content-centered…

The nature of collaborative learning involves intensive interactions among collaborators, such as articulating knowledge into written, verbal or symbolic forms, authoring articles or posting messages to this community's discussion forum, responding or adding comments to messages or articles posted by others, etc. Knowledge collaborators'…