Thinking Semantic Wikis as Learning Object Repositories

Wikis have been extensively adopted in educational contexts becoming repositories of potentially reusable, self-contained learning units (commonly known as learning objects). Unfortunately, wikis lack of the packaging and metadata facilities that are needed to enable effective reuse of these units. In this article we propose an approach to use semantic wikis as learning object repositories, we discuss its challenges and its potential, and we present a conceptual model and its implementation based on the Semantic MediaWiki engine.