XplanaZine

This is the first in a multi-part series on the process of developing ontologies in education and understanding why they matter. These articles are a continuation of a series on taxonomies in education also publisheded in XplanaZine (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4). In this first article, I describe what ontologies are by comparing them to a game I use in my classrooms that helps students learn a foreign language.

When I want to teach my language students about the process and essence of language, I have them play a game called “A New Language in Twenty-Five Words” (a game of my own invention, as far as I know). The premise is that you are traveling to a new planet and are charged, as the team’s linguist, with creating a new, efficient language comprised of only twenty-five building blocks or words (for the sake of simplicity, we use English or Spanish). I give the students ten minutes to come up with a list of twenty-five words with which they can express the greatest number of concepts or meanings possible.

Some students essentially spin the roulette wheel and simply make a list of their favorite words. Inevitably, those experiments score high on creativity and are expressive in one dimension but they fail to provide an overall communications network. For example, a couple of years ago a young coed put together a string of romantic and bucolic terms that included love, romance, infatuation, feelings, attraction, sun, nature, flowers, birds, etc. High on the emotive scale but not very useful for describing complex physical entities or economic structures.

Other students gravitate immediately to the real task. What is the perfect balance between base words and expanders or connectors? I could list all family members, male and female–mother, father, sister, brother– or I could list only female members and introduce the word not as one of my building blocks and thereby double my efforts while saving words. The family members would be base words while not serves as an expander. These students will begin producing lists that assume binary and three-dimensional identities by using words such as not, and, or plus.

After the game, I give my students a lecture about the nature of language and what is required for acquisition or proficiency (the exercise differs slightly depending on the class in which it occurs — Advanced Spanish Composition, Advanced Spanish Conversation, or Teaching Methodologies). Language, I remind them, is about vocabularies inside of recognized or experienced categories.

In other words, no one learns a language without acquiring vocabulary, or what I call the basic building blocks of vocabulary. And, over the years, language acquisition studies have taught us that students learn vocabulary more easily when it is contextualized within familiar boundaries or actions. For example we often begin with commands related to common actions such as “Stand up” or “Walk to the ____”. We group vocabularies into categories– such as family, house, diversions and pastimes– that are already part of an adolescent or adult learner’s life. The goal is to help learners acquire as many words as possible over a short period of time.

Any language learner, however, will tell you that basic vocabulary will only get you so far. Six hundred words and phrases may make a tourist look good but those building blocks alone are hardly enough to kindle real language usage. That’s because language consists of more than these basic building blocks. There are also higher-order rules that tell us all the ways we can put those blocks together to create more sophisticated language statements.

These language rules fall into the broad categories of grammar and syntax. And when we add some kind of feedback (via a teacher or using a language in a community) to the building blocks and their governing rules, we end up with language acquisition and proficiency.

Knowing this, we write language textbooks based on a pyramid strategy of sorts — create a wide base of vocabulary, provide a sturdy middleware of grammar and syntax, and then provide students opportunities for language usage and feedback so that they can become proficient in the language.

Now, if we take this beyond the learner and apply it to language in general, we find a parallel evolutionary structure and some interesting tendencies. Languages, in general, begin with utterances and other basic building blocks. Because languages are communal constructs, and because their goal is communication with others, languages necessarily develop beyond the building-block phase over time in order to provide more sophisticated expression that can reflect the complexities of an evolving community. This evolution occurs both naturally — through brute-force evolution as more and more people use the language — and systematically — as writing evolves and formal rules (grammar and syntax) are introduced into the process.

Of course, this process is not quite as orderly as all this. The base and middle do not always form a perfect pyramid. Sometimes, languages (i.e. communities) do not create or sustain enough momentum to generate a base that will hold up or produce rules for writing and formal use. Once formal rules are introduced into a language, they tend to expand over time until they become inefficient and disproportionate to the base (the base still being wider but not by enough). This is because formal rules are generally introduced as a classification or descriptive system and the people building those systems want to make sure that the rules account for everything (present or possible).

What we end up with, when all is said and done, is a pattern in which, over time, the building blocks of a language continue to grow (new vocabulary words for new discoveries and experiences), while the formal rules diminish through reductionism or other efficiencies through usage.

So what does this have to do with ontologies? Plenty. Because ontologies are comparatively the grammar and syntax of a cataloguing platform. You can add ontologies to the basic building blocks of a cataloguing framework — i.e. a taxonomy — in order to create an intelligent and evolving storage system. And, because ontologies and taxonomies follow the same patterns we see in language acquisition and language evolution.

Just as grammar and syntax allow you to create sentences and talk about more evolved topics, ontologies allow you to create relationships between taxonomies that are not necessarily evident (either to a user or to you the creator). And, with abundant usage, feedback, and the proper rules, these ontologies can emerge into sophisticated organizational systems that “anticipate” what users want (the same way you can finish sentences for people with some accuracy in a conversation).

What does this mean for education? Well, for starters:

Ontologies mean that you will be able to go to a learning object repository, input your syllabus for a class, and receive back a whole course that is tailored specifically to your syllabus and your teaching preferences.

Ontologies mean that all repositories or libraries can be queried to produce new learning or teaching material that we previously had no thought of because we could not see all the relationships that existed among the various learning pieces.

Ontologies mean custom publishing at warp speed and product development at a speed we haven’t measured yet.

Ontologies mean that we are approaching a time in education technology where teachers can focus entirely on teaching.

How about that?

In my next article, I’ll talk specifically about how we go about building ontologies and their relationship with taxonomies. Following that, we’ll wade a bit further into the deep end with an overview of complexity and how it applies.