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Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law, ASU. Interactive online civics curriculum, free to all users

KHarvester (Informal Knowledge Harvester) is a SOA layer which collects RDF data from web pages. It provides REST based Web Services for managing data available on Social Semantic Information Sources (SSIS): semantic blogs, semantic wikis, and JeromeDL (the Social Semantic Digital Library). These Web Services allow saving harvested data in the informal knowledge repository, and providing them in a form of informal Learning Objects (LOs) that are described accroding to LOM (Learning Object Metadata) standard. Also, IKHarvester is an extension to Didaskon system. Didaskon (διδάσκω - gr. teach) delivers a framework for composing an on-demand curriculum from existing Learning Objects provided by e-Learning services (formal learning). Moreover, the system derives from SSIS which provide informal knowledge. Then, the selection and work-flow scheduling of Learning Objects is based on the semantically annotated specification of the user's current skills/knowledge (pre-conditions), anticipated resulting skills/knowledge (goal) and technical details of the clients platform.

A system and method for organizing knowledge in such a way that humans can find knowledge, learn from it, and add to it as needed is disclosed. The exemplary system has four components: a knowledge base, a learning model and an associated tutor, a set of user tools, and a backend system. The invention also preferably comprises a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow these components to work together, so that other people can create their own versions of each of the components. In the knowledge web a community of people with knowledge to share put knowledge in the database using the user tools. The knowledge may be in the form of documents or other media, or it may be a descriptor of a book or other physical source. Each piece of knowledge is associated with various types of meta-knowledge about what the knowledge is for, what form it is in, and so on. The information in the knowledge base can be created specifically for the knowledge base, but it can also consist of information converted from other sources, such as scientific documents, books, journals, Web pages, film, video, audio files, and course notes. The initial content of the knowledge web comprises existing curriculum materials, books and journals, and those explanatory pages that are already on the World Wide Web. These existing materials already contain most of the information, examples, problems, illustrations, even lesson plans, that the knowledge web needs. The knowledge base thus represents the core content (online documents or references to online or offline documents); the meta-knowledge that was created at the time of entry; and a number of user annotations and document metadata that accumulate over time about the usefulness of the knowledge, additional user opinions, certifications of its veracity and usefulness, commentary, and connections between various units of knowledge.

Open Educational Resources are all about sharing. In a brave new world of learning, OER content is made free to use or share, and in some cases, to change and share again, made possible through licensing, so that both teachers and learners can share what they know.