Thinking about the semantic Web
I saw a mention of mSpace on Slashdot today and it couldn’t have come at a more opportune time. My brain has been stewing for several weeks now trying to figure out a way that our Hopkins teachers could share the lesson plans that they’ve created with the rest of the staff. I’ve looked at some online curriculum mapping products that advertise their ability to drill all the way down to individual lesson plans. (More posts on that later.) And just yesterday I saw a demo of the Infinite Campus student information system that purports to support sharing (or at least storage) of teacher lesson plans. None of these products have me convinced yet.
mSpace seems like a totally different approach that is worth a look. I’ve already downloaded the 97-page technical report and will start reading that later, but the abstract gives me hope:
The mSpace interaction model describes a method of easily representing meaningful slices through these multidimensional spaces. This paper describes the design and creation of a system that implements the mSpace interaction model in a fashion that allows it to be applied across almost any set of RDF data with minimal reconfiguration. The system has no requirement for ontological support, but can make use of it if available. This allows the visualisation of existing non-semantic data with minimal cost, without sacrificing the ability to utilise the power that semantically-enabled data can provide.
I’m not going to lie and say that I understand all of this stuff. But I understand the problem I’m facing. I want teachers to be able to create lessons that might involve all sorts of media and make those available for searching for their colleagues who may want to search by subject, academic standard, or some other characteristic. Looks like I’ve got some light reading for tonight.
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Having been down this lightly-trod path myself, I can say that you’re looking at a serious metadata problem, and investing your mental energy in grokking some serious metadata tools is well worth it. I downloaded mSpace. It doesn’t look *too* difficult to install, but I didn’t really have time to get into it. If you get it running before I do I have some RDF data you can put into it and see what happens.
When we get around to building this stuff into SchoolTool, starting in a couple months, it’ll be a very sem webby system itself.
Re: “…I want teachers to be able to create lessons that might involve all sorts of media and make those available for searching for their colleagues who may want to search by subject, academic standard, or some other characteristic”
…and have content standards referenced, and include standards-based assessments.
What will become the standard? Is there a metadata model for K-12 educators to work from?
This sounds like a really cool space for an mspace. We’re looking at building tools to make it easier for non-geeks to
a) define mspaces for whatever collection of info they want
b) publish their data to be discovered by an existing mspace model.
This means that groups could publish their lesson plans with light-weight metadata, and be picked up by an mspace browser driven by the lesson plan model.
We’re looking at using a blog-like model of pings/trackbacks to alert an mspace that data associated with a particular part of the space is new or has been updated.
There’s a 10 page paper with a section on how this will work at
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10710/
Please give us a shout if you’d like to be alerted of mspace updates.
I haven’t had much time to work on the curriculum repository project lately, but I definitely plan to come back and try to grok the mSpace work a little more. Thanks for the pointer to the condensed paper. (That full-length one was a workout.)