Keyword: The Semantic Web
I kept coming back to the notion of the Semantic Web described by Anderson (2008) as an internet, “…where commercial content is augmented, annotated, enhanced and, in some cases, displaced by content created by end users themselves. Increasingly, ways are being developed to have content harvested, filtered, repurposed and transformed through the manipulation of both human and automated processes” (p. 19). I contemplated the concept to understand why I found it so captivating and thought about it metaphorically as a rapidly evolving cyborg-like organism, leading me to sci-fi notions of a dystopic surveillance state – or perhaps not so sci-fi, but real-life concerns of algorithms, and the mining and manipulation of personal data for commercial interests.
Although it is difficult not to ruminate on these perpetually increasing concerns, I realized that the semantic web also lends itself to one of the most exciting digital phenomena: the rapid and expansive collaboration of user knowledge, data and experience for the purpose of learning, connection, and creativity. I am thinking about the massive user-generated hypertextual encyclopedia of Wikipedia, the DIY digital museum-like spaces of Tumblr fandoms, or Twitter’s ability to instantly disperse first-hand accounts of unfolding news and events. Sure, much of these sites’ success relies on pre-programmed, algorithmic semantic web capabilities, but to exist, this content creation also requires active and engaged user participation – which leads to another aspect of the semantic web, folksonomies. In a 2020 article exploring the functionality and history of the hashtag, Burgess describes a paradigm shift in the internet landscape, when users began generating their own taxonomies as they sorted through the steadily increasing data of the internet:
The Flickr folksonomy of user-contributed tags was paradigmatic of Web 2.0 ideology – marked by a shift from the web 1.0 idea that web development was about serving content to audiences to one where the goal was building architectures for participation of users (sometimes distinguished from passive website “visitors”) and the expectation that the user community’s activities would add further value” (para. 12).
Anderson (2008) also explains the folksonomy phenomena, “…through explicit tagging by users and through the tracking of usage. This data is then used to search, retrieve, reconfigure, and filter information on the Net, a capability that has application for many educational, entertainment and commercial applications” (p. 20). From one perspective, Anderson’s description sounds like a wonderful concept for us to ‘try’ to integrate in our future online learning designs, and from another perspective, this concept is already so mundanely part of our regular digital lives. I could think of many examples of how collected user-generated content on the internet is a regular part of our lives, but here are three (especially boring) examples from my day, today:
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- My headphone jack stopped working, so I Googled “headphones with usb connection” and read about The 5 Best Headphones of 2021 (Links to an external site.) as well as several other anecdotal posts about why usb connections on headphones are actually better
- Every day, rather than reading than news, I read u/cyclinginvancouver’s provincial Covid-19 updates on the Vancouver subreddit (Links to an external site.), including the comments, which often feature supportive remarks from familiar users, and further data analysis, by anyone who wants to participate
- To learn how to have different footers on different pages in Word I read through these Quora responses (Links to an external site.)
I want to continue to think of ways to integrate semantic web capabilities, both through thoughtful programming and design, and through allowing for user-generated data opportunities within the digital tools I create, (ideally, by consciously avoiding decisions that may lead to the aforementioned dystopic web). We can see that the functionality of the semantic web allows for millions of organically created, informal communities of practice across the internet, that many of us are accessing daily at various stages of engagement – it makes sense that we should aim to integrate this same social collaboration in our learning environments.
How do others interact with the semantic web? Have you found interesting ways to integrate semantic web functionality through educational technology?
References:
Anderson, T. (2008). Towards a theory of online learning. In Anderson, T. & Elloumi, F. (Eds.), Theory and practice of online learning, 45-74.
Burgess, J. (2020, July 9). Friday essay: Twitter and the way of the hashtag. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-twitter-and-the-way-of-the-hashtag-141693