High School and College Students Get Rare Opportunity to Help Change the World Of Education
Students Everywhere Are Encouraged to Contribute to the Open Ontology Project: Be a Part of the Beginning Stages of the Open Ontology Project and Help Shape Its Future
View The Open Ontology Project here: https://www.ContextU.com
Calling all students everywhere! Pierre Schwob, an inventor and entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, is inviting high school and college students all over the world to transform the Information Age into the Knowledge Age by providing context with The Open Ontology Project. This is the first time ever students can both demonstrate what you teach them and contribute to a ground-braking project to develop context all of us can use. The Open Ontology Project (OOP) at ContextU.com is easy to use, and yields deep levels of understanding.
Schwob quotes John Naisbitt in Megatrends, “We are drowning in information, but starved for knowledge.” Today, it is estimated that information doubles roughly every year and IBM projects it might soon double every 12 hours!
Swiss-American Schwob created the “Open Ontology Project,” a family-tree of knowledge, to grasp a concept through its connections to other ideas, events, people, objects or places. He says, “Context is everything. It is essential to transform information into knowledge.” The OOP will provide an easy, accessible, context-driven map of the entire human knowledge landscape. The OOP offers an intuitive navigation between related concepts.
Schwob said, “When I was teaching computer science at NYU, FIT and in China in the 80’s, and entrepreneurship last year at a summer camp at Stanford, I always reserved the first 5-10 minutes to provide context on the concepts I was about to present. And I was always struck at how I could observe the students’ anxieties melt away, physically, as they understood why we were focusing on that material and where it fit within their own knowledge. Context gives meaning to content. It was essential to the comfort of my students and the effectiveness of my teaching.”
The OOP is not to be confused with Wikipedia. The OOP presents concise descriptions of core concepts and focuses on the crucial contextual relationships between them. The OOP is an undertaking to organize all of human knowledge, at a scale never seen before.
The Ontology provides a top-down approach to topics.This pyramid structure allows users to easily see information organized by relevance and see how concepts relate to each other.
The Open Ontology Project is a free, open-source platform, allowing anyone to add information which is then peer-reviewed by vote or supervised by a teacher or an internal team of editors to ensure the authenticity and accuracy of information provided. Each item description is limited to 150 words. Links are provided to outside sources, such as peer-reviewed journals, conference proceedings, books, encyclopedias, video sources, and courses such as Khan Academy, edX, and the like. The goal is for the user to easily grasp the most important concepts and how they are related to other topics without having to hunt for that information.
Schwob, passionate about astrophysics and cosmology (an asteroid has been graciously named after him) and technology in the service of culture (he invented a radio receiver technology that became part of a national standard, and created the largest classical music website in the world) has always been a fervent believer in the power of contextual learning.
Sign up at ContextU.com, and help use context to increase knowledge of the world and to better understand past, present, and possible futures.
How to Register:
- Register for free to get a URL and a password to share with your classroom
- Students enter the site and provide the given password, their first name and last initial. Nothing else. They receive a login ID and a private password (you can change) which they’ll use to login to the site
- They can then create small articles (we call them “nodes”) of no more than 150 words each, place them in context (through the selection of parent-node(s)) and optionally select an image, date, location(s) on a map, and external references
- Upon your approval, their nodes are published, credited to them and their school
- Each student-contributor is then given a Gold Badge attached to their name, if their node is visited by 20 or more users.