The topic of the Semantic Web came up during a chat last night with colleagues in CTL 1799. Our chat on Wednesday had fewer participants than Monday's and I think it made it easier. I'd also been a "chat captain" in Monday's chat, and felt less pressure "speaking for myself" on Wednesday.

I mentioned CANCORE-compliant "objects" during the chat. At one point I was asked to define what I meant by the term Semantic Web. My response -- "all speaking the same language."

This becomes especially important in the constructivist, development and learning environment I think the WWW represents. Once web-based repositories "speak the same languauge" access to knowledge, and "a template" for building more, are accessible to all.

You factor-in David Wiley's concepts of "scalability and sociability" and "sustainable education" and you've got a recipe for some powerful "dynamic knowledge building."

NOTES:

• I'm having a hard time keeping up with Wiley. I visited his presentations page to get the link above and see that he's added another PDF since my last visit.
  
  
• He means it when he captions the PDF files "large" -- the first one was a little shy of 38 MB
  
  
• These files will take a long time to download --nearly ten minutes on DSL/Cable
  
  
• . . . and probably much longer than most are prepared to spend, downloading the files over dial-up connections