To 2.0 or 3.0 ? A Year of Change? Lessons Learned from the MEducator Project

Recent social web advances have highlighted the importance of openness, social collaboration and participation, social networking and crowd intelligence and have pinpointed key new terms like “Apomediation” and “disintermediation”. Moreover, recent advances in the semantic web front, have shed light and emphasis on the notion of linked data, which basically concerns the publishing of structured data so that it can be interlinked more effectively and hopefully become more useful. By fusing the above concepts together in mEducator (www.mEducator.net) we have managed to organise, repurpose, re-use and share medical educational resources by capitialising such novel approaches in both semantic and social web dimensions. Different platforms have been created to enable this endeavour. Pivotal role in so doing has played the mEducator ontology, which has been designed to provide a consistent data scheme, across the various mEducator instances. As the platforms get enriched with educational content, resource discovery, retrieval, sharing and reuse becomes more complicated. Consequently, advanced search features are needed to avoid content duplication and assist the learners in conveniently locating relevant content. In this presentation some of these platforms (www.meducator2.net; www.meducator3.net) will be demonstrated, while the experiences and best practices registered so far by their communities of practice will be summarised and discussed. Finally, it will be shown how mash-up and semantic tools have been utilised to create geographical maps of learning resources, their connections with other learning materials as well as the relationships built in the environment amongst the users (educators and/or students). This latter facilitation has been recently named as “educemiolody”, which stands for the creation and study of “epidemiological” maps, displaying how medical learning resources from one Institution or academic teacher or expert are distributed to other places and connected to other resources and people, so as to be used in other educational contexts. []