Mobile Learning with Linked Open Data

In this paper we present a learning environment based on the integration of 2 technologies that promise to shape the future of education: the mobile technologies and the semantic web. The educational potentials of mobile learning are briefly discussed in the paper, together with some of the difficulties in running and evaluating experiences of mobile learning. Amongst these difficulties, we focus on the workload for teachers who have to organize and develop up-to-date educational contents for mobile devices, followed by the risk of rapid obsolescence of the content; we argue that by integrating Linked Open Data, one of the most challenging product of the Semantic Web, with Mobile Learning technologies we can overtake these difficulties. In order to support our arguments, we introduce MeLOD, a mobile learning environment which exploits the huge amount of dataset in the Linked Open Data cloud to provide students with contextualized and continuously up-to-date information based on students' location. The position of the student sent by the mobile device is used to interlink and explore GeoNames DBpedia and Europeana datasets and return information about all the interesting cultural heritage sites close to the student. Moreover, students produce new knowledge items that are gathered in a dataset created within the MeLOD project, which is compliant with the requirements for the LOD cloud. Finally, typical activities performed in the Social Web, such as voting and commenting, are used to enhance the knowledge base of the learning environment and to provide recommendations for next students' visits.