Ten Reasons Why

Current system for education is not working
Affordances of the Net makes the difference
star trek metaphor: Google as the computer that can answer any question a la the Star Trek computer

need increase in quality, quantity, and interaction
different kinds of interactions (Anderson, 2002, Equivalency Theorem)
Learner/Teacher, Learner/Content, Learner/Learner, Teacher/Content, Teacher/Teacher, Content/Content (agents, content that is aware of itself)

From student-teacher to student-content
Look at ways to substitute student content interaction for student-teacher interaction (student-teacher is resource intensive and not scalable

From student-teacher to student-student
development of communities of inquiry (e.g. slashdot)
teachers gain from developing content
having students create the content for their studeies -- why save all the learning for the teachers

Are those interactions equivalent?
strength in one of those three (student-teacher, student-content, student-student) allows for less emphasis on the other two

What is an Agent:?
autonomous, goal oriented, self-starting, operates more or less continuously, adaptable, network-enabled

really need a structured, properly tagged semantic web to work effectively

**** sample from u. of saskatechwan
http://www.cs.usask.ca/i-help
agents to help students connect to each other to get help
each students agent negotiates with the other students.

[comment: would make a cool Building Block for Blackboard]

Content Agents
update and refreshe content
manage IP rights through such structure rights data as ODRL Open Digital Rights Language (http://odrl.net)
repair and protect content
alter content in response to student models and contexts (user modeling)

Teacher Agents
marking, managing, tutoring, guiding, coordinating, scheduling
inserting new content into course web site, notifying and update as necessary
tracking developments in both discipline and scholarship of teaching.

two modes of thinking about the web
Structuralists (web as meaningful, semantic information)
Presentationalist (web as display and experience)

example: EMI, Experiments in Musical Intelligence
David Cope, UC Santa Cruz
http://arts.ucsc.edu/faculty/cope/Emmy.html
agents that "learn" the style of composers and can then compose and play music in that style

Anderson: This is what we'll be able to do in education

The Semantic Web
coined by Tim Berners-Lee
based on formal ontologies
will be many ontologies that have to talk and work together

tools of the semantic web
XML
RDF

[Laptop battery died! Rest of notes were taken by hand and transcribed later, during dessert. :-) That's one way to cut calories! :-) ]

ontology -- a set of concepts

tools to create ontologies
DAML + OIL
OWL
tools to help define subject and relation to other subhjects
step one -- tag LOs in ways they can be searched and retrieved
example for non-education: SportsML

moving beyond learning objects
problem: changing context may change LO's function
education is not content
context needs to be tagged

SCORM -- naive, "object should be independent of any learning context" (quote from ADL SCORM site)

EML -- education markup language
Rob Koper @ Dutch Open University
http://eml.ou.nl

basic unit moves from LO to unit of study

EML is basis of IMS Learning Design spec

create a language for the IMS-LD
roles, objectives, activities, environment
IMS LD = EML Lite
spec divided into three levels
core elements
adds properties and conditions to control flow of design
sending messages/notifications
dropped DocBook for IMS Content Packaging spec
not backwards-compatible with first EML players

big problem: no existing players for IMS-LD

work being done by U. of Quebec, Gilbert Paquette
James Dalziel, WebMCQ (Australia)

[I saw the WebMCQ product recently -- good product]

next generation learning management systems takes content from various sources and aggregates it

[that's what an LMS does now? Or I think he means it's done automatically via agents]

problems: no dedicated editors, no players, no community, complex spec

conclusion: will change context of formal and informal learning

questions from audience:

how to get students to do all they can instead of all that is required?

[question from me]: Where are all the authoring tools?
answer: Where are all the players?

[comment: that was a frustrating answer. It's a chicken and egg kind of situation.]

question: who does the tagging?

question: Concern of agents run amok (tied to Star Trek example from beginning). How do agents know something about you? They'll need to know that if they are to become co-teachers.

[final note: My experience was that most of the questions asked were good, but the answers were not forthcoming. Mostly the answers just acknowledged that the question was good and a question that needed ansewring. :-/]