This document submits that the existence of objective knowledge and the possibility of communicating it by means of language have traditionally been taken for granted by educators. This paper presents a brief outline of an alternative theory of knowing that takes into account the thinking organism's cognitive isolation from "reality." This orientation was proposed by Vico at the beginning of th...

In recent years, we have witnessed the blooming of Web 2.0 content such as Wikipedia, Flickr and YouTube, etc. Howmight we benefit from such rich media resources available on the internet? This paper presents a novel concept called Mediapedia, a dynamic multimedia encyclopedia that takes advantage of, and in fact is built from the text and image resources on the Web. The Mediapedia distinguishe...

Recent years have seen significant advances on the creation of large-scale knowledge bases (KBs). Extracting knowledge from Web pages, and integrating it into a coherent KB is a task that spans the areas of natural language processing, information extraction, information integration, databases, search and machine learning. Some of the latest developments in the field were presented at the AKBC-...

This study investigates to what extent collaborative knowledge construction can be fostered by providing students with visualization tools as structural support. Thirty-two students of Educational Psychology took part in the study. The students were subdivided into dyads and asked to solve a case problem of their learning domain under one of two conditions: 1) with content-specific visualizatio...

Guiding principles for selecting the best crowdsourcing methodology for a given information gathering task remain insufficient. This paper contributes additional experimental evidence and analysis to this problem. Our work focuses on a subset of crowdsourcing problems we term expert tasks—tasks that require specific domain knowledge. We experiment with crowdsourcing a knowledge base (KB) of sci...

The German distance learning university uses the web-based collaborative learning platform CURE to support different collaborative learning scenarios, e.g. collaborative exercises or virtual seminars. During these scenarios students form learning groups upon teacher's request and collaborate on a common task. But as soon as the given tasks are accomplished, in most times the collaboration stagn...

This paper presents new methods for extracting semantic knowledge from collections of annotated images. The proposed methods include novel automatic techniques for extracting semantic concepts by disambiguating the senses of words in the annotations using the lexical database WordNet, and both the images and their annotations, and for discovering semantic relations among the detected concepts b...

perceptions of Vygotsky’s cultural-historical theory – from scarce knowledge of it, to seeing it as one among many accounts of social factors in child development, and eventually, to a wide acknowledgment that this theory provides a unique perspective on human development and implicates profound changes in many fields of psychology and education. As this approach is rapidly gaining in popularit...

Software quality models provide a framework to measure and evaluate software quality of software systems. They are the basis upon which classify requirements and may be eventually used to guide the quantification of these requirements, especially non-functional requirements. Lots of approaches for building quality models have been proposed in the last decades, but still their reuse along differ...

Students, while acquiring as well as communicating knowledge, are regularly engaged in processes related to the organization and representation of information. However, representational skills and processes are not explicitly taught, and the process by which students learn and apply these skills is an issue still in need of systematic study. This paper describes an exploratory study on the acqu...