EDUSOFA - A PLATFORM FOR SECOND-SCREEN EDUCATION

Thanks to the internet, information is available everywhere. People find information on websites, large public data collections, wikis, blogs, twitter messages and so on. However, interconnecting all this information and making it available at the right moment and in the right format is an increasingly difficult challenge. The ITEA2 European project Twirl will address this by creating an open platform able to process, query, enrich, interlink and fuse data originating from real world applications and knowledge extracted from virtual data sources (e.g. open linked data, social communities & forums, blogs, wikis, RSS). The Augmented Entertainment domain aims at enriching multimedia user experience in a digital home setting. The capacity of TWIRL to aggregate knowledge issued from different data sources (personal blogs, twits and other Web-related social activities) can be exploited in order to make the multimedia experience rich of interactivities and more personal. With TWIRL, the digital content is not delivered independently as an atomic unit but augmented with all the relevant and pertinent knowledge that can be extracted or added from external sources related to the content. Contextual information can also be integrated so that the experience becomes social, and environment-sensitive. The second-screen is a rising phenomenon. According to Nielsen, in Q4 2011, the vast majority of American tablet owners (88%) and smartphone owners (86%) said they used their device while watching TV at least once during a 30-day period. The second-screen has a huge potential for e-learning. A smartphone or tablet could be used to obtain complimentary content, connect to an instructor, or interact with other learners. This paper describes the EduSofa platform, the results of the national survey on the second-screen technology for education and a common format for representing the educational content on second-screen environment.