The TED talks dataset exposes all metadata and the actual transcripts of TED talks that are published as structured Linked Data (Taibi et al., 2015). The TED talks collection is composed of more than 1800 talks, along with 35000 transcripts in over 30 languages, related to a wide range of topics. In this regard, TED videos provide a useful source of information to learn a subject or a language or to be updated on the latest news or research. TED talks metadata available in structured, multilingual and HTTP-accessible form, constitute a valuable resource for schoolteachers, for instance, to explore controversial contemporary topics with their students in order to stimulate awareness and critical thinking or as a means for language learning. Moreover, being compliant with state-of-the-art Linked Data principles facilitates the computation of links with related data and resources
The Dataset can be found here: http://data.l3s.de/dataset/ted-talks
Usecase
In 2015 the dataset has been integrated in the LearnWeb platform (http://learnweb.l3s.uni-hannover.de/) in order to improve search results related to teaching and learning scenarios.
One of the largest communities using LearnWeb is the YELL/TELL professional online community of English language teachers belonging to the University of Udine, Italy (Bortoluzzi and Marenzi, 2014). The community of teacher-trainers, trainee-teachers, and students has started in January 2012 and includes in total 538 users at the time of writing. They use LearnWeb not only to share their resources and teaching experiences, but also to search the Web for additional educational resources for their students. TED videos are a valuable source for teaching languages especially because of the presence of multilingual transcripts.
The availability of the TED dataset allows teachers to carry out educational activities with their students, for example to highlight specific terms in the transcripts, or to easily display synonyms, and to find more contextual information about the topic or the subject of a talk from available Linked Data knowledge sources, such as DBpedia, Freebase or Yago.
The TED talks dataset is used at the University of Lecce, Italy, within the course "Interpretazione lingua inglese I" supported by the LearnWeb platform. Learning tasks carried out by students are:
- analyse the video in order to identify key concepts, markers of the textual structure, expression indicating the stance of the speakers, expression indicating epistemic mode, expression of deontic mode (Bianchi and Marenzi, 2016).
- Create personal medical glossaries taking the items from a specific TED talk on medicine, suggested by the teacher, and from other material used in class (Taibi et al. 2018).
REFERENCES
Taibi Davide, Chawla Saniya, Dietze Stefan, Marenzi Ivana & Fetahu Besnik (2015). Exploring TED talks as linked data for education. British Journal of Educational Technology (BJET). 46(5), pp. 1092-1096. doi: 10.1111/bjet.12283
Bortoluzzi M. & Marenzi I. (2014). YELLing for collaborative learning in teacher education: users’ voices in the social platform LearnWeb2.0. International Journal of Social Media and Interactive Learning Environments, 2(2), 182-198.
Bianchi and Marenzi (2016). Investigating student choices in performing higher-order comprehension tasks using TED talks in LearnWeb. In Lingue e Linguaggi Vol. 18 ISSN 2239-0367, e-ISSN 2239-0359.
Taibi D., Bianchi F., Kemkes P. and Marenzi I. (2018). Learning Analytics for Interpreting. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 1: CSEDU, ISBN 978-989-758-291-2, pages 145-154. DOI: 10.5220/0006774801450154