Subject: Re: Science Education Portals Date: Sun, 12 Dec 1999 09:54:01 -0500 From: Geoffrey Fox ------- Blind-Carbon-Copy To: "Roscoe Giles" cc: gcf@npac.syr.edu, "Reagan Moore" , "Ann Redelfs" , "Scott Lathrop" , "Raquell Holmes" , "Ilona Lappo" Subject: Re: Science Education Portals In-reply-to: Your message of "Sun, 12 Dec 1999 06:36:39 PST." Date: Sun, 12 Dec 1999 09:54:01 -0500 From: Geoffrey Fox > Several points: > > * My understanding of the "partial ordering" idea was simply that there are > sets of events whose relative time ordering is functionally significant (for > example, the events initiating and comprising the multimedi streams you > describe) and there are others which are un-related. Thus, even though > timestamps allow for a total ordering of all events (assuming that there is > no problem establishing global time at the required resolution), only a > partial ordering of related events is significant. So for example of multiple clients, this says there are lots of tags, time, recipient, event-type, and one can choose to sort in many ways and as in distributed recipient-specific queues, even use this soring to implement storage of distributed data-base Am I corrct? > > * I agree that the tools required for assessment of learning are an angle > for education that we should push. About a year ago, I was trying to get > folks at REC (who do education evaluation at NSF) interested in the idea of > "instrumenting" educational web sites to enhance the ability to do learning > assessments. They were interested but then got re-orged. I have two students who are writing theses in this general area but the work is not great (yet). The thesis that is almost finished is meant to discuss the role of client (mouse-clicks etc.) and server (web page logs) events in assesment > > * Another related activity is the portal's adjustment to capabilities of the > user (for example, people with disabilities). The generalization is the way > in which the portal models its user. The education portal must (?) be able > to model properties of the user that the user is perhaps unaware of and > therefore unable to simply set as a preference. How ambitious is this > element? Well Trace center is of course key here. I think they believe this is a huge exciting project and putting it in this proposal is inappropriate. My favorite portal architecture today (namely Berkeley's Ninja system) is a good framework here as built around events with active proxies to be "agents" learning and mapping data > > * Finally, what about non-human portal users (agents?). Is it not part of > our portal philosophy that portals should be functionally usable by agents? > Does this include the education portal? Yes -- describe a good example where this is useful? > > -- Roscoe > > > Reply by Geoffrey Fox gcf@npac.syr.edu, http://www.npac.syr.edu, Phones Cell 3152546387 Office 3154432163 Npac 3154431723 Fax 3154434741 ------- End of Blind-Carbon-Copy