Educational resources as social objects in semantic social networks

Educational content is often shared among different educators and is enriched, adapted and in general repurposed so that it can be re-used in different contexts. This paper exploits the various aspects of object-centered sociality that the educational resource can manifest in a participatory virtual community of authors and learners. These social facets include: (a) the obvious connections via common tags; (b) connections based on collective usage and other related interaction of human users; (c) social connections based on the inheritance as realized via educational content repurposing; (d) semantic connections and similarities of accompanying metadata. The concept of exploiting the various aspects of educational resources as social objects is shown in the implementation of the MetaMorphosis+ social network for educational resource sharing in health sciences.