Description

Develop a concept and a prototype of a content-centric social network, including

a semantic content network that autonomously evolves according to ontology-based reasoning a social dialog layer enabling meta content and theme-centric personal exchange a mobile learning environment that subsumes content presentation and social interaction on mobile devices raising peer-to-peer technologies and Web 2.0 to knowledge acquisition and further development bringing asynchronous messaging and synchronous communication such as videoconferencing to the application domain of undirected personal learning.

Figure: A Semantic Overlay Network  Integrates Interactive Users with Content Repositories

Point of departure:

Over the last years, eLearning efforts have been dedicated to content and management aspects. Educational systems for organizing virtual classes, presenting online content and assessing individual skills have been deployed,  its impact however remained limited to walled gardens or restricted communities. At the same time and in a parallel world, a huge content repository arose from the Wikipedia project, granting knowledgeable insights to those compiling the content, but leaving contextless, keyword-based smattering to numerous blind consumers. In concentrating on rich educational content and beneficial organization, universities have not succeeded in generating  immersive student involvement on large scale.

Starting from the perspective that open content is necessary, but not sufficient to facilitate discourses and understanding among learners, the challenge is accepted to bring together content reception and conversational exchange. Based on peer-to-peer and Web 2.0 technologies, a seamless integration of private and public, volatile and persistent dialogs among learners is in focus of Mindstone with its  design of a social network that combines contextual content access with individual desires to share learning experiences at home and on the mobile companion.

This work is grounded on the Hypermedia Learning Object System hylOs.