e-Vocabularies and e-Learning

Dear Colleagues,

You are cordially invited to participate in our monograph, which will address, for the first time, different experiences and theories developed in the recent years on the construction and use of electronic vocabularies (eVocabularies) with web-mediated educational purposes (eLearning). A vocabulary is a linguistic resource that helps manage, query, and retrieve information and/or knowledge via words (Boguraev, 1996). Some examples of vocabularies are (1) term lists; (2) glossaries; (3) classifications and taxonomies; (4) thesauri; (5) ontologies; (6) dictionaries; and (7) lexicons and lexical databases (CEN/CWA 14871:2003). All of them have been used somehow, thus far, in order to structure knowledge in a flexible way for a number of tasks (e.g., natural language processing, conceptualization, document classification, indexing and information retrieval).

Most possibly, education is one of the areas where vocabularies have proven to be more useful and, specifically, in the subarea of e-learning. In this particular field, vocabularies (electronic vocabularies, in this case) help teachers and students, for instance, (1) comprehend and relate the concepts and the objects of a given knowledge domain; (2) understand and learn languages, be they specialized or not; and (3) identify, describe and query knowledge and digital educational resources.

However, it is also in this field where vocabularies seem to be less systematically developed, known, studied, analyzed, compared and/or linked. For this reason, we think it is high time to collect and present in a dedicated volume the main theoretical approaches to the field and the most relevant experiences about the construction, use and evaluation of digital vocabularies relating e-learning. This is quite an ambitious challenge, but it clearly addresses the needs of a most interesting, useful, promising, multidisciplinary area of research and development, involving computational lexicography, lexicology, terminology, terminography and e-learning.

Therefore, the Guest Editors of this Special Issue welcome the submission of papers presenting original research in this multidisciplinary area which (1) include a comprehensive and critical review of any of the proposed topics (see below); or (2) discusses the construction, application and/or evaluation of some electronic vocabulary for or within education and/or learning (preferably e-learning).

Topics relevant to this Special Issue include (but are not limited to):

• the construction of electronic vocabularies (electronic dictionaries, thesaurus, taxonomies, lexical databases, ontologies) of the education domain and/or for educational purposes;
• the use of electronic vocabularies (learners' dictionaries, thesaurus, taxonomies, lexical databases and ontologies) for learning (language, linguistic and/or terminology learning, domain knowledge representation and learning);
• experiences on the use of virtual education for lexicography/terminology learning;
• the use of educational (pedagogical) criteria for lexicography and/or terminology;
• experiences on terminology planning in and/or for education;
• the construction and/or use of electronic vocabularies to index, classify and describe learning resources;
• quality of lexical and/or terminological resources;
• standardization in the areas of lexicography and terminology; standardization of lexical and/or terminological resources;
• reviews on computational lexicography and/or terminography;
• experiences on lexicography/terminology learning and/or teaching in e-learning scenarios;
• reviews on applications of computational lexicography and/or terminology to e-learning.

Please, note that if this Special Issue eventually includes more than 10 papers, it will be made available in printed book format (with an ISBN). An example can be found at http://books.mdpi.com/.

Important dates:

• 30 September 2015: Submission of invited proposals (500-words abstracts) deadline
• 5 October 2015: Notifications sent to authors of invited proposals
• 15 November 2015: All papers (invited and regular) submission deadline
• 18 December 2015: Notifications sent to all authors
• 15 January 2016: Final version of papers submitted

Even though it is not required, we encourage authors willing to submit a regular paper to send an abstract to the Guest Editors as soon as possible, in order to receive some feedback about their chances to be included in this Special Issue and/or how it could be adapted to better fit into it and avoid any overlaps.

For invited papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website, and manuscripts could be prepared following the “Instructions for Authors” at https://www.mdpi.com/journal/education/instructions.

Dr. Ana-María Fernández-Pampillón
Dr. Antonio Pareja-Lora
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All papers will be peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Education Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

References:

-          Boguraev, 1996, “Building a Lexicon: The Contribution of Computers”. International Journal of Lexicography, vol. 4 no. 3. Pp.227-260

-          Comité Européen de Normalisation (CEN). 2003. Controlled vocabularies for learning object metadata. Typology, impact analysis, guidelines and a web based vocabularies registry  (CEN/CWA 14871:2003).