ONT Re: Inquiry Driven Learning Environments (IDLE's)
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| Do you guess I have some intricate purpose?
| Well I have . . . . for the April rain has, and the mica on
| the side of a rock has.
|
| Walt Whitman, 'Leaves of Grass'
If I had an ulterior motive for educing here, now, and henceforward
these more incidental and most likely tangential issues of learning,
and what will no doubt to some appear to be the more petty problems
of paideia, I think that it would be a bit like this: That many of
the problems that our Student S and our Teacher T will have to face,
in transferring knowledge of a content domain from the other to the
one, are strikingly paradigmatic of the questions that we encounter
in attempting to rustle up an ontological delicatessen from scratch.
| Document History
|
| Subject: Extensions Of Mind
| Subhead: Essays And Reports On Intelligent Systems
| Contact: Jon Awbrey <jawbrey@oakland.edu>
| Version: Draft 3.02
| Created: 10 Sep 1993
| Revised: 08 Mar 1995
| Updated: 08 Feb 2002
| Advisor: C.C. Wagner
| Setting: Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan, USA
| Excerpt: Division 3 (Affective Computability)
| Excerpt: Subdivision 3.2 (On the Uses of Adversity)
3.2 On the Uses of Adversity: Friction at the Learner Interface
3.2.1 Salient Problems, Focal & Peripheral
Problem 1. Achieving Intelligent Context-Sensitive Help. For our purposes,
"context" is characterized as "place in a script". The script is viewed as
an arbitrary (either novel or typical) sequence of symbolizable actions that
can be followed jointly by the Student and the Tutor. From the general notion
of a script-as-performed and actually (if partially) observable it is possible
to tease out or to disentangle two separate scripts: The script-as-programmed
into the Tutor and the script-as-understood by the Student. All scripts are
novel to somebody sometime, even if way back in phylogenetic history, and it
seems like a good design feature to keep track of the frequencies with which
shareable segments of scripts are actually used, and with what actual results.
Problem 2. The Interjection ("Huh!?" or "Say What!?") Operator. There is
an identified need for the Student to have a constantly available response
for interrupting an ongoing script and expressing surprise at events taking
place in the tutoring environment. There is the corresponding need for the
Tutor to be alert and sensitive to the expectation failures, the transaction
misunderstandings, or the contract violations that are signaled by the Student
and for the Tutor to have a resource for responding with material and pertinent
explanations of at least these three types of events:
| 1. Actions initiated by the Tutor.
|
| 2. Events occurring or processes transpiring in the tutoring
| system as consequences of either Student or Tutor choices.
|
| 3. Assertions made by the Tutor about features and functions of objects,
| in other words, about the properties, roles, structures, and dynamics
| of objects in the immediate content domain.
3.2.2 Side Issue: Coping With Process
It might be useful to implement a "next after" relation in one of the
available knowledge bases, perhaps developing a specialized knowledge
base for "ongoing processes" (OP's), so that the Tutor has the ability
to account for, and to give good accounts of, the action in many arenas,
both to explain its own procedures and also to provide instruction about
temporal developments in the target domain, in the way that "instance of"
and "isa" are used to explain its predications of properties for objects.
3.2.3 Occasions of Surprise
Expectation failures can be opportunities for learning, but
they can also be sources of disappointment, frustration, and
obstruction of learning. The Student's composite model of the
object domain and of the tutoring system is what generates these
expectations in the first place. Therefore the nature of these
expectation failures should provide diagnostic information for
the types of changes that it may be necessary to make in either
the Student's model or the Tutor's model of the 3-adic situation,
that is, the setting involving Object domain, Student, and Tutor,
or in their models of each other as participants in the 2-adic
learning transaction. The cases may be classified as follows:
| 1. The Tutor misunderstands the nature of the Student or
| poorly presents the content domain. When the Student
| responds in a fashion that the Tutor does not expect,
| this may point to the following kinds of problems:
|
| a. An insufficiency in the Tutor's model of the Student.
|
| b. A problem in the Tutor's presentation of the content.
|
| 2. The Student misunderstands the tutoring system or the structure
| of the subject matter. This possibility arises when the Tutor
| says or does something that the Student does not expect in the
| context in question. Ineptness of the tutoring software aside --
| but how could that happen? -- this points to an insufficiency
| in the Student's model. The Student's combined model of the
| content domain plus the tutoring system is faulty and brings
| the Student to expect things at variance with the facts that
| apply to the content object or operative context in question.
| It is the Tutor's job to mediate understanding -- to act as
| a catalyst toward the Student's synthesis of new models for
| the object domain and for the whole learning process itself.
Jon Awbrey
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