Subject: (Asynchronous) EOT ITR Info Resent-Date: Tue, 14 Dec 1999 09:35:53 -0500 Resent-From: Geoffrey Fox Resent-To: p_gcf@npac.syr.edu Date: Tue, 14 Dec 1999 01:04:58 -0500 From: "Roscoe Giles" To: "Ann Redelfs" , "Geoffrey Fox" , "Ilona Lappo" , "Lisa Bievenue" , "Raquell Holmes" , "Reagan Moore" , "Roscoe C. Giles" , "Scott Lathrop" Greetings all. I apologize that this message is asynchronous with any that may have been sent today, but I have been offline. I just wanted to mention some of the discussions we have had today at the CSCL (Computer Supported Collaborative Learning) conference here at Stanford. Scott, Lisa, and I are talking to people here about the ITR plans. Here are some miscellaneous bits: (1) I talked with John Cherniavsky about the proposal. He was quite encouraging about its prospects in the first round (preproposals). I certainly had the impression that if we followup the directions we are evolving, we are likely to be successful in the first round at least. (2) The need for a learning / cognitive expert for the team has only been reinforced by discussions here. We have not identified the correct person yet, but there are lots of ongoing discussions. More anon. (3) From conversations with Jeremy Rochelle of SRI: a) Target for our efforts at a "meta" level might be a framework for "collaborative design" rather than a tool for authoring of curricular materials/environments. This collaborative design idea (which apparently has some currency in this community at present) is to involved teachers and discipline specialists in working together to create educational experiences and artifacts. Scientists would bring discipline expertise, teachers would bring pedagogy, and the portal would support there efforts. b) JR did not seem to think there are people systematically exploring the instrumentation of web enviroments for the purposes of assessment. As far as he was aware, there is lots of work on non-data rich assessments and only relatively trivial (my word) analysis of events generated in interactions with automated systems. He refered me to John Branford and Barbara Means as experts in this area. I/we will contact them. In any case, the message seems to be that the question of event based assessment is important and not yet well understood. An important idea is to intelligently collect and preprocess event data rather than try to simply post process a raw list of events (mouse clicks, etc). (4) More (from me) about portals for people vs for agents: There is not that much difference! "In cyberspace we are all cyborgs" Translation: people interacting with the portal do so indirectly using their own computational instruments. Currently, the instrument may be minimal such as a browser whose only personality are preferences such as fonts and perhaps layouts that don't mean much semantically to the portal. In general, however, we should expect a person interacting with the portal to appear with their own "agents" which will exchange information with the portal, bring information into the user's computational domain, and represent the user's capabilities and cognitive needs to the portal. From the portal's point of view there is not that much difference between a person+agents and pure agents. (I just got this, I apologize if everyone else already had figured it out!). More tommorrow, best, -- Roscoe -------------------------------------------- Professor Roscoe C. Giles Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering Boston University roscoe@bu.edu; http://roscoe.bu.edu (617) 353-9590; Fax: (617) 353-6440 EOT-PACI: http://www.eot.org --------------------------------------------