1. School of something FACULTY OF OTHER School of Computing FACULTY OF ENGINEERING Sharing of Community Practice through Semantics: A Case Study in Academic Writing Alex Le Bek Website Design: simple solutions from advanced technology alex@alexlebek.com Vania Dimitrova Lydia Lau School of Computing University of Leeds {vania,llau}@comp.leeds.ac.uk AWESOME project, funded by the UK JISC programme

2. Technology Aspect Current Technologies for Academic Writing  Lack of holistic support  Technological fixes but no ecology  Text focused, not user-focused (“about” vs “how to”)  Individual needs not catered for  Collaboration, engagement in communities not supported The AWESOME Approach  Process-driven design  Web 2.0 approach - exploit and extend available solutions  Flexibility – platform adaptable to different domains and practices  Openness – users shape and populate the environment

3. Process-Driven Holistic Design Academic Writing Process  Provide support for the main steps in academic writing  Enable students and teachers to actively contribute in each step Community Functioning Process  Forming, bonding, nourishing, sustaining  Encourage students’ involvement  Provide help with community moderation User-Centred Design-Development Process  User trials while the environment is incomplete  Tailoring development to usage

4. Academic Writing Process (initial idea)

5. Semantic wikis for learning Semantic wiki was the natural choice for our project  Content annotation  Emerging ontology structure  Semantic Forms for enhancing ease of use and structure  Tag clouds and Folksonomy  Embedding of Audio/Video  Community Bibsonomies and Portals  Blogs; Chat  Dynamic content (e.g. AWESOME press, inline query results)

6. Semantic-enhanced Support for the AW Process: What is a dissertation  Community content – direct editing and ‘transclusion’ of pages  Dissertation examples - semantic query on property values for pages on the category ‘Dissertation’.  Edit/Add dissertation examples – with semantic form  Ask questions – with semantic form  Provide descriptions for top tips – direct editing  Ask questions – semantic form  Example how a dissertation can be marked with semantic content  Categories and properties  Emerging ontology  Property with context links for usage (e.g. ‘Good writing’)  Value of having an ontology

7. Semantic-enhanced Support for the AW Process: What is a dissertation Semantic form for adding and annotating an example dissertation

8. Semantic-enhanced Support for the AW Process: What is a dissertation Factbox to examine semantic markup

9. Semantic-enhanced Support for the AW Process: What is a dissertation Tables to browse through dissertation annotations or through structured dissertation questions/answers

10. Semantic-enhanced Support for the AW Process: How to choose a topic  Topic ideas – inline query extracts anything in the category ‘Topics’ and tagged with the property ‘is top tip’  Semantic Form to discuss a new topic idea  FAQ semantic form

11. Semantic-enhanced Support for the AW Process: How to choose a topic Tables to browse through semantic markup

12. Semantic-enhanced Support for the AW Process: How to formulate research questions How to investigate a problem  Semantic form to learn from other comments on papers  Property ‘Research Method’ will make it easy to subsequently find out all references to a research method and to find out more about the method itself

13. Semantic-enhanced Support for the AW Process: How to investigate a problem?  Semantic form to learn from other comments on papers  Property ‘Research Method’ will make it easy to subsequently find out all references to a research method and to find out more about the method itself

14. Semantic-enhanced Support for the AW: How to communicate ideas clearly?  Mining semantic content on the fly by querying on the property ‘Good writing’  Property values (red links) can be pages themselves which can include additional descriptions  E.g. ‘identify key issues’  Feedback 1 exemplifies how ‘good writing’ and ‘bad writing’ can be marked up and how writing can further be broken down depending on the marking scheme used

15. Semantic-enhanced Support for the AW: How to communicate ideas clearly? Semantic annotations to point at good/bad writing examples

16. Semantic-enhanced Support for the AW: How to communicate ideas clearly? Form for easy access to feedback examples

17. Semantic-enhanced Support for Community Processes Use semantics to extract a general overview of the community

18. Research Directions  Social Semantic Web & Intelligent Learning Environments  Still in an embryonic stage, unexplored opportunities  Semantic wikis for learning – new challenges  Benefits of semantic markup  Capture emergent semantics  Examine commonalities and differences of AW practices across domains and institutions  Derive models of communities  Provide community-aware support  Examine the link between individual needs vs community  Provide intelligent support

19. Initial Prototype: Main Characteristics http://awesome.alexlebek.co.uk/wiki/  Semantic Content  Semantic Media Wiki  Emerging ontology structure  Semantic Forms for enhancing ease of use and structure  Tag clouds and Folksonomy  Embedding of Audio/Video  Community Bibsonomies and Portals  Blogs  Chat  Dynamic content (e.g. AWESOME press, inline query results) The examples are taken from two MEd modules at the School of Education, Leeds University