Emerging Web 3.0/Semantic Web Applications in Higher Education:

Growing Personalization and Wider Interconnections in Learning
(Charlotte, North Carolina: IAP Information Age Publishing, 2015)

 

Charles Wankel, St. John’s University, New York, and Agata Stachowicz-Stanusch, Silesian University of Technology, Gliwice, Editors

 

Call for Chapter proposals

As ELMAR members know, the Web is evolving from a place where a prodigious amount of text and images are stored to a place where educational and other needs are serviced. The Web is becoming increasingly automated with functions that previously required human action undertaken automatically moving learners and other users more quickly to useful support. More and more such services interoperate with each other through computer programs and agents. This is the territory of semantic Web services and Web 3.0. Just as shop bots and auction bots abound in handling a particular task on the Web currently, in higher education of the future such related bots and agents will interact with the heterogeneous information that is the stuff of higher education. The scale of such agent-based mediation and linked data will grow over time. Increasingly, intelligent agents and bots will undertake tasks on behalf of their faculty, administrator, and student owners. Collaborations among faculty and students around the world will be increasingly supported by semantic social networks capable of providing crucial functions. Students can be engaged in participating in the design and development of semantic Web applications in such areas as structuring and representing knowledge. The increasing availability of interactive educational tools and collaborative community-resources, such as wikis, can be the foundation for deploying semantically marked-up and social-connected educational spaces where students construct their own learning pathways in explorations of knowledge and creating new content integration.

This volume will share visions and partial realizations of the impact of the semantic Web and associated Web 3.0 features on higher education. This volume will provide accounts of cutting-edge pedagogic applications of the semantic Web with its extremely extensive use of interconnecting information technologies. New vistas of the personalization of learning objects in virtual learning environments (virtual worlds, for example) is a particularly exciting topic. Students’ learning styles, preferred learning activities, and germane teaching approaches in Web 3.0 environments are welcome topics. Another invited topic for this volume will be how learners can be enabled to be aware of the characteristics and dimensions of organizationally embedded learning in university courses and contexts, or such learning in their workplaces or homes. Another topic, cloud technologies, presents new ways of gathering information that can be exploited for learning by individuals. For example, cloud technologies can facilitate semantic tagging and the recognition and acknowledgement of informal learning activities. Finally, we are open to articles on the post-Web-3.0 world, the Web 4.0 epoch where people will be able to upgrade themselves mightily in ways appropriate to bolster the tasks at hand through technology extensions. Similarly, we welcome articles with overviews and models of semantic Web/Web 3.0 educational applications.

PUBLICATION SCHEDULE:  

Book chapter proposals received: March 20, 2014
Notification of peer-review decisions: March 26, 2014
Receipt of full book chapters: May 23, 2014
Chapter authors receive peer reviews with editorial feedback: June 6, 2014
Final revisions due: July 6, 2014
Book publication with 2015 copyright: December 1, 2014

Submit a one-page or so chapter proposal.  Also, include for each of the coauthors a brief biography including terminal degree, current institutional affiliation and position, and a listing of any related publications. For each coauthor include contact information, so we can readily contact you ideally including: email address, mobile phone, work phone, home phone, and Skype (if you do not mind us contacting you through these). We realize that this is a very fast schedule.  However, we believe that moving agilely to a first draft during the spring term will work best for getting our book done in a timely and robust way. 

 

Send proposals and inquiries to both:

Charles Wankel wankelc@verizon.net and Agata Stachowicz-Stanusch agata.stachowicz@polsl.pl