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IADIS International Conference WWW/Internet 2010A TOOL TO SUPPORT AUTHORING OF LEARNINGDESIGNS IN THE FIELD OF SUSTAINABLE ENERGYEDUCATIONSotirios Karetsos and Dias HaralampopoulosEnergy Management Laboratory, Dept of Environment, University of the AegeanMytilene, GreeceABSTRACTSustainable energy education is anticipated to contribute to the solution of a sequence of challenges–problems relatedgenerally with the dominant developmental models and particularly with the energy production and consumption. Withinthis contribution we examine the integration of an ontology based framework for learning design in sustainable energyeducation area with a semantic wiki, as a web based tool supporting the collaborative construction, improvement andexchange/ dissemination of learning designs in the field of sustainable energy education.We conjecture that the semantic wiki technology platform constitutes an adequate environment, in terms of its usabilityand expressiveness, for the building and supporting of a community of practice in this area.KEYWORDSOntology; learning design, sustainable energy, semantic wiki, collaborative authoring.1. INTRODUCTIONThe efficiency of the development of learning scenarios highly depends on the ability to reuse existingmaterials and expertise (Pawlowski & Bick, 2006). While the issue of reuse in education was initiallyfocused in content, hereafter the focus was shifted to the activity oriented approach, which promotes a modelof the teacher as a designer and is enhanced from the parallel development of tools in the WWW, stimulatingthe emersion of communities of practice for the exchange of learning scenarios and experiences (Brouns, etal., 2005; Pernin & Lejeune, 2006). One such category of popular tools that support more and morecommunities to collaboratively produce and exchange knowledge are Wikis (Nixon & Simperl, 2006).However, according Kousetti, et al. ( 2008), if the web is considered as a continually growing collectionof documents readable only by people does not fully exploits the stored knowledge. Thus the evaluation,collection, adaptation and distribution of the ever growing amount of educational material in the domain ofsustainable energy education, coming from various resources, in various languages and forms, constitutes atroublesome undertaking. This problem becomes more critical due to the reported teacher’s lack of basiceducation on sustainable energy (Papadimitriou, 2004; Skanavis, et al., 2004; Spiropoulou, et al., 2007),necessitating teachers’ training.Semantic Web can support addressing such problems. According Aroyo and Dicheva (2004), SemanticWeb technologies and standards are needed, along with new methods and types of courseware compliantwith the Semantic Web vision, in order to adaptation, flexibility and interoperability be achieved in the webbased educational systems. Furthermore the combination of Wiki and Semantic Web technologies is alignedwith the requirements of knowledge society for life-long learning and flexible learning environments(Schaffert, et al., 2006). It pairs the user-friendliness of wikis, as Social Software giving users freedom forchoosing their own processes and supporting multi-site content generation and collaboration anytime andanywhere, while Semantic Web technology gives the possibility to structure information for easy retrieval,reuse, and exchange between different systems and tools. Additionally, learning modes dovetailed inherentlywith wiki environments, as cooperative and group learning are becoming increasingly important as problemsare usually solved by teams and not by individuals (Dello, et al., 2006; Schaffert, et al., 2006).345