Abstract:
The author describes his experience with students interacting with
some websites he made for didactics and how this led him to an appreciation
for the need for better searching tools and strategies for education. The
students’ difficulties emerging from the above observations were a special
case of the more general problem evidenced from people while searching
information on the web. Semantic web is then discussed as a way to help
people overcome their difficulties in using the web to gain knowledge.
The paper describes some models for knowledge construction and analyzes
them in terms of their suitability as instruments for the introduction of
semantics on the web. The paper then provides evidence regarding some
limits for the systematic use of semantic search engine and ontology domain
systems in everyday teaching and knowledge construction. Finally, the paper
reports and explains a hypothesis of an information system for building
communities of practice and letting them work on the construction of domain
ontology. The paper concludes that this construct is well adapted to the
model for knowledge construction firstly hypothesized, and can give good
results in teaching-learning planning and carrying out and in helping
scientists and scholars to analyze scientific paradigms and to find new trends
for research.
