seminar
Semantic Web Technologies for Personalized Learning and Collaborative Teaching
Integrating information technology into our curricular has been on the agenda of all Hong Kong Schools. Personalized learning stresses the importance of learning objectives that drive applying the ‘Right’ technologies to transfer the ‘Right’ skills and ‘Right’ materials to the ‘Right’ person at the ‘Right’ time. The challenge is to find the optimal mix of content and activities for a person in different learning stages. To facilitate the identification and discovery of relevant learning objects for individual needs, we have applied Semantic Web technology to construct a Personalized Education Ontology (PEOnto). PEOnto serves to address various PE scenarios and enable delivery of personalized educational services within a web-based education system (WELS). In this seminar, we will introduce WELS and demonstrate a collaborative curriculum and instruction design tool that supports collaborative teaching, encourage teachers to share invaluable pedagogical design and deliver constructive online instructions, through the implementation of a successful ITEd capacity building framework (WELNET) that strengthens communication and promotes sharing among schools and teachers.
Dr Apple W P FOK joined the Image Computing research group as a PhD student in 2003 after receiving a 1st Class Honours BSc Degree in the Computer Science department. She completed her PhD thesis in 2006, having published 26 international refereed publications and 2 invited papers; received the several awards including the prestigious Thomas HC Cheung Postgraduate Scholarships in 2005; won 2 international Best Paper awards in personalization and semantic web (ontology) technology and won an international competition for the best non-commercial web-based Software. At the same time, she has successfully bid for and led 5 consecutive HKSAR Quality Education Fund (QEF) projects and 1 HKSAR EDB (EMB) consultancy project. During the past 3 years, as a Senior Research Fellow and project leader for the QEF and related consultancy projects, Dr Fok has proposed a sustainable collaboration model and applied it to establish a local capacity building and e-learning community which now includes over 40 local schools, supporting over 40,000 students and teachers. This e-learning community is based on an international award winning web-based e-learning platform (WELS) which Dr Fok has designed and developed as part of her PhD work. Dr Fok has also developed a mobile computing platform for on-line assessments as well as the application of virtual reality in learning.