Collaborative Authoring of Walden’s Paths

Abstract

The World Wide Web contains rich collections of digital materials that can be used in education and learning settings. The collaborative authoring prototype of Walden's Paths targets two groups of users: educators and learners. From the perspective of educators, the authoring tool allows educators to collaboratively build a Walden's Path by filtering and organizing web pages into an ordered linear structure for the common information needs, which can be extended, tailored and modified into a derivative path from its parent version to meet dynamic and evolving educational requirements. From the students' perspective, Walden's Paths provide a shared knowledge space that facilitates collaborative learning. Specifically, collaborative learners can annotate locally and globally on pages and share among group members, where each annotation fosters the initiation of a thread of discussion. Therefore, knowledge transfer can be achieved in the process of social interaction associated with shared annotations.

An Educational Tool for Browsing the Semantic Web

“…When asked whether the proposed system could help learning, both of them said positively because at least the system can be used by non-experts to browse through the set of RDF documents and HTML documents which can be designed by technical persons. All they need to do is follow carefully designed links such as Walden's path (Li et al, 2012). They also mentioned that it would be better if the current system could support other functions such as an efficient way of displaying the relationships of the nodes instead of showing all, which could become very complex.…”