LinkedUp Open Education Veni Competition: The winners!

The winners for the LinkedUp Veni Competition, organised by the LinkedUp Project were announced today at the Open Knowledge Conference in Geneva.

The LinkedUp Project, a multi partner consortium funded by Framework Programme 7, want to push forward the exploitation of the vast amounts of public, open data available on the Web, in particular by educational institutions and organizations.

Entrants to the Veni Competition, the first of three open and linked data competitions being run by the LinkedUp Project, were challenged to create prototype tools or demos that analyse or integrate open web data for educational purposes.

Submissions were received from 12 different countries – including Greece, the United States, and Nepal. There was a huge breadth in submissions: from crucial areas such as mobile education, knowledge sharing and museum visits, to politics and sustainable development.

And the winners are:

Third Place: We-share (Prize – 1000 EUR)

We-share is a social annotation application for educational ICT tools, which allows educators and teachers to search, create and and enrich descriptions of ICT tools. Find out more about the application here.

Team: Adolfo Ruiz-Calleja, Guillermo Vega-Gorgojo, Juan I. Asensio-Pérez, Eduardo Gómez-Sánchez, Miguel L. Bote-Lorenzo, Carlos Alario-Hoyos (from the Universidad de Valladolid and Universidad Carlos III de Madrid)

Second Place: Globe-Town (Prize – 1000 EUR)

Globe-Town explores open data for sustainable development education, allowing the user to explore the ‘intersections, tensions and trade-offs’ in sustainable development, including the environment, the economy and society.

Team: Jack Townsend, Andrea Prieto-Vega, Richard Gomer, Will Fyson, Dom Hobson and Huw Fryer (from University of Southampton, and Independent from Southampton)

AND THE WINNERS: Polimedia (Prize – 2000 EUR)

Polimedia improves the analyses of radio & newspaper coverage of political debates, by connecting transcripts of the Dutch Parliament with media coverage in newspapers and radio bulletins. More information can be found here

Team: Martijn Kleppe, Max Kemman, Henri Beunders, Laura Hollink, Damir Juric, Johan Oomen and Jaap Blom (Affiliations: Erasmus University Rotterdam, VU University Amsterdam, TU Delft, Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and VU University Amsterdam and Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid).

The evaluation committee was led by the LinkedUp advisory board, and the rest of the committee can be found on the LinkedUp Challenge website. In judging the entries, the committee considered many aspects of the entries including innovation, attractiveness and usefulness. They also looked at the relevance for education, the usability and performance of the tools, the data the entry uses or provides, and the way privacy and other legal aspects are dealt with.

There was also a ‘Peoples Choice Award’, a more informal award given to the team who got the most votes on our Ideascale platform. The winner of this prize – winning a toy helicopter, was We-share.

Congratulations everyone!

Building upon the success of the Veni Competition, the LinkedUp Project will launch the Vidi Competition, in November. The Vidi Competition will involve more data, will be more challenging, will offer more support and more prizes.

If you are at OKCon, come by the LinkedUp poster session or grab one of the LinkedUp team to ask more. If you haven’t been able to join us in Geneva, please express your interest to hear more by signing up here.