Weekly PhD Report 06, week 4

Work done:

- Presented the topic of my research interest at HMDB lunch

- Kept on reading research papers on different recommender systems and issues

- Finalised the chapter for the LOR review

Things to do:

- Continue by paper reviews

- Continue to work on my research questions and establish a plan for it

- Start preparing the work on a social information retrieval book chapter that was accepted in a call for contributions. See an abstract below

Towards Interoperable Social Recommendation: Storing, Sharing, and Reusing Evaluations of Learning Objects

Abstract

Since the early days of the use of digital learning resources in teaching and learning, quality has played an important role, sometimes more implicitly than explicitly. In the domain of digital learning resources, a plethora of ways to evaluate learning resources exists. However, limited ways to share and reuse these evaluations for social information retrieval purposes currently exist. Social recommendation is based on the opinions of the members of a community, in order to help individuals in that community more effectively identify content of interest from a potentially overwhelming set of choices.

This chapter emphasises the importance that the representation and storage of user experiences and evaluations of learning resources has, as a means to support social recommendation, and help users search the Web for learning resources in an effective and efficient manner. Thus, this chapter proposes a scheme for storing results from learning resources’ evaluation in a structured and reusable way, so that they can be shared between social recommendation systems. More specifically, the chapter develops an Evaluation Learning Object Metadata (evaLOM) model, a metadata schema that allows the description of the evaluation method used for learning resources, as well as storing its evaluation results. This model is part of a larger specification called Learning Object Log Specification (LO Log).