![](bg8.png)
VisualPedia Knowledge Base. As pointed out also
from the heuristic analysis, the number of educational
objects currently stored within VisualPedia is too low
(around 30 objects). Despite our great efforts in push-
ing the teachers to provide a certain number of educa-
tional objects, they end up with a really small number.
This is due, from the one hand, to the high working
load in the teaching activities and, to the other hand,
to a lack of motivation in participating to the project.
In order to face this problem we need to move
along different directions. First, we plan to consider
mash-up technologies for gathering educational ma-
terials from the Web (e.g. WikiPedia) and then tai-
loring the materials to the user with disabilities. In
this way, the original information can be left in the
original source and only a view of it can be stored
within VisualPedia with modifications necessary to
face the user difficulties. The second direction is to
directly involve the students in the production of ed-
ucational objects under the teacher supervision. By
integrating in VisualPedia tools like WikiDashboard
(http://wikidashboard.parc.com/), teachers can check
the students’ activities and identify those that effec-
tively worked on their homeworks. Last but not least,
we should work on teachers’ motivation, trying to un-
derstand how to involve them in the development of
new educational objects in the same spirit of authors
of user-generated content (Nov, 2007).
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work has been partially funded by the Minis-
tero Italiano della Pubblica Istruzione under Azione 6:
Progetto nuove tecnologie e disabilit
`
a. We would like
also to thank all the participants who took part to the
evaluation phase for their patience and enthusiasm.
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