The social semantic web in intelligent learning environments: State of the art and future challenges

Today's technology-enhanced learning practices cater to students and teachers who use many different learning tools and environments and are used to a paradigm of interaction derived from open, ubiquitous, and socially oriented services. In this context, a crucial issue for education systems in general, and for Intelligent Learning Environments (ILEs) in particular, is related to the ability of leveraging these new paradigms for creating, maintaining and sharing the knowledge that these systems embed. This will enable ILEs to benefit from shared information from disparate systems, which is related to learning content and student activities, so that the overall complexity of system development and maintenance would be reduced while at the same time improving the capability of personalization, context-awareness, and interaction. In this article, we investigate how the Social Semantic Web can be leveraged for enabling and easing this process. We first analyze each module of a typical ILE, showing how it can benefit from the Social Semantic Web paradigm and then proceed to investigate how this new paradigm can be leveraged for increasing interactivity level of ILEs.