Abstract:

Learning is the reflective activity that enables the learner to draw upon her/his previous experiences and background knowledge to conceptualise, realise, understand and evaluate the present, so as to shape her/his future actions and to construct and develop new knowledge for her(him)self. Learning strongly depends on meetings of awarenesses (or self realisations) which we see as achieved through the experiences that mentors and learners undertake jointly. Self realisation is a type of self organisation process and always organises itself. In fact, self realisation is always going to be continued. This research will conceptually focus on multiple categories through the adult learners’ developing conceptions of learning. The focus will be on different categories from the basic conceptions to excellent ones. I will take an appropriate model of students’ developing conceptions of learning into my consideration. The model sketches on Säljö’s seminal studies on learning in the learner's perspective. I will employ the most significant characterised learning conceptions that are seen through the lenses of the adult learners. This characterisation will be applied over the most significant categories of learners’ developing conceptions of learning. Some categories like 'Meaning Construction', 'Reality Interpretation' and 'Self Awareness (Self Realisation)' could be known as the most excellent and the most transcendental conceptions used by learners. Consequently, I will employ the highlighted concepts in order to design a semantic representation of learners' developing conceptions of learning. This semantic representation will be a graph whose nodes represent the main identified concepts and whose arcs represent the relations between the concepts. According to Description Logics and their descriptive features, a concept can be observed as an idea and that idea can be transformed into a hypothesis in order to be corresponded to a distinct entity [and, respectively, to a group of entities] or to its [their] essential features. The ideas determine the applications of terms and phrases. An idea is a significant part in the use of reasons and languages. My desired semantic structure will provide a structural representation of the learners' developing conceptions of learning that could support a kind of top-level ontology, i.e., an ontology representing the learners’ developing conceptions of learning based on educational informatics. I shall draw your attention to the fact that in information sciences an ontology is described as an explicit (and formal) specification of a shared conceptualisation on the domain of interest. Ontologies of a thing/phenomenon support different researchers in providing appropriate specified descriptions with regard to various concepts relevant for that thing/phenomenon. I shall emphasise that I will need to employ some descriptive features of Description Logics (DLs) for representing fundamental terminologies and world descriptions as the backbones of the desired semantic representation. Description Logics are the most well-known family of knowledge representation formalism. They are all supported by First-Order Predicate Logic.

Keywords:

Learning conception, self realisation, semantic representation, top-ontology.