Pearce_domain_modeling

Notes on Education Domain Modeling (Back to Education Ontology)

Note from Liza Loop (June 17, 2014)

The word, 'Education', is derived from two Latin roots: 'e' or 'ex' meaning 'out' or 'out of'' and 'ducare' meaning 'to lead'. Education leads you away from where you are to someplace new. It is related to teaching, learning and schools in complex ways. It also entails a vast number of 'learning objects', ideas, stories, documents, physical objects, situations and events. How do these various elements relate to each other? Perhaps more important, how may we characterize the learner as he or she begins when we first look at him or her learning and as he or she is led out of that place? All of these relationships can be seen as the domain of education. Modeling this domain is a challenge. Meeting this challenge becomes important as we move away from storing our cultural heritage on paper, which can be accessed by sorting through piles on shelves and in boxes, and begin to keep our records in the digital where only a rational machine (computer) can place it before our eyes. The machine relies on the model to locate the item we're looking for. Unless we have created an effective model it will be very difficult to retrieve the information we seek.

This page is inspired by Jon Pearce's course in Domain Modeling at San Jose State University in California. Jon Pearce's old course post

Please add your ideas and resources to it. By doing this you will keep them available for yourself, the HCLE staff, Jon and his students and anyone else interested in this topic.

Wondering about the difference between an 'ontology' and a 'taxonomy'? Here's a nice answer.

Taxonomy for Microcomputer Learning Environments In 1982, Paul Christensen and Liza Loop wrote a research report for Far West Educational Laboratory that contained a taxonomy that is probably still relevant. Find it at the