Building Intelligent Interactive Tutors

Student-centered Strategies for Revolutionizing E-learning

Beverly Park Woolf

• Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780080920047
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Human-Computer Interaction
• Index: Computer Science

Building Intelligent Interactive Tutors discusses educational systems that assess a student's knowledge and are adaptive to a student's learning needs.

The impact of computers has not been generally felt in education due to lack of hardware, teacher training, and sophisticated software. and because current instructional software is neither truly responsive to student needs nor flexible enough to emulate teaching. Dr. Woolf taps into 20 years of research on intelligent tutors to bring designers and developers a broad range of issues and methods that produce the best intelligent learning environments possible, whether for classroom or life-long learning.

The book describes multidisciplinary approaches to using computers for teaching, reports on research, development, and real-world experiences, and discusses intelligent tutors, web-based learning systems, adaptive learning systems, intelligent agents and intelligent multimedia.

It is recommended for professionals, graduate students, and others in computer science and educational technology who are developing online tutoring systems to support e-learning, and who want to build intelligence into the system.

• Combines both theory and practice to offer most in-depth and up-to-date treatment of intelligent tutoring systems available
• Presents powerful drivers of virtual teaching systems, including cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and the Internet
• Features algorithmic material that enables programmers and researchers to design building components and intelligent systems

Part I. Introduction To Artificial Intelligence And Education

Chapter 1. Introduction

People need a lifetime to become skilled members of society; a high school diploma no longer guarantees lifelong job prospects. Now that the economy has shifted from manual workers to knowledge workers, job skills need to be updated every few years, and people must be prepared to change jobs as many as five times in a lifetime. Lifelong learning implies lifelong education, which in turn requires supportive teachers, good resources, and focused time. Traditional education (classroom lectures, texts, and individual assignments) is clearly not up to the task. Current educational practices are strained to their breaking point.

The driving force of the knowledge society is information and increased human productivity. Knowledge workers use more information and perform more operations (e.g., compose a letter, check its content and format, send it, and receive a reply within a few moments) than did office workers who required secretarial assistance to accomplish the same task. Similarly, researchers now locate information more quickly using the Internet than did teams of researchers working for several months using conventional methods. Marketing is facilitated by online client lists and digital advertising created by a single person acting as author, graphic designer, layout artist, and publisher. To prepare for this society, people need education that begins with the broadest possible knowledge base; knowledge workers need to have more general knowledge and to learn with less support.

Information technology has generated profound changes in society, but thus far it has only subtly changed education. Earlier technologies (e.g., movies, radio, television) were touted as saviors for education, yet nearly all had limited impact, in part because they did not improve on prior educational tools but often only automated or replicated existing teaching strategies (e.g., radio and television reproduced lectures) (McArthur et al., 1994).

On the other hand, the confluence of the Internet, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science provides an opportunity that is qualitatively different from that of preceding technologies and moves beyond simply duplicating existing teaching processes. The Internet is a flexible medium that merges numerous communication devices (audio, video, and two-way communication), has changed how educational content is produced, reduced its cost, and improved its efficiency. For example, several new teaching methods (collaboration and inquiry learning) are now possible through technology. Multiuser activities and online chat offer opportunities not possible before in the classroom. What one knows is, in youth, of little moment; they know enough who know how to learn.Henry Adams (1907)

We do not propose that technology alone can revolutionize education. Rather, changes in society, knowledge access, teacher training, the organization of education, and computer agents help propel this revolution.

This book offers a critical view of the opportunities afforded by a specific genre of information technology that uses artificial intelligence and cognitive science as its base. The audience for this book includes people involved in computer science, psychology and education, from teachers and students to instructional designers, programmers, psychologists, technology developers, policymakers, and corporate leaders, who need a well-educated workforce. This chapter introduces an inflection point in education, discusses issues to be addressed, examines the state of the art and education, and provides an overview of the book.

1.1. An inflection point in education

In human history, one technology has produced a salient and long-lasting educational change: the printing press invented by Johannes Gutenberg around 1450. This printing press propelled a transfer from oral to written knowledge and supported radical changes in how people thought and worked (Ong and Walter, 1958). However, the advances in human literacy resulting from this printing press were slow to take hold, taking hundreds of years as people first learned to read and then changed their practices.

Now computers, a protean and once-in-several-centuries innovation, have produced changes in nearly every industry, culture, and community. It has produced more than incremental changes in most disciplines; it has revolutionized science, communication, economics, and commerce in a matter of decades. Information technology, including software, hardware, and networks, seems poised to generate another inflection point in education. An inflection point is a full-scale change in the way an enterprise operates. Strategic inflection points are times of extreme change; they can be caused by technological change but are more than technological change (Grove, 1996). By changing the way business is conducted, an inflection point creates opportunities for players who are adept at operating in the new environment (e.g., software vendors and e-learning companies) to take advantage of an opportunity for new growth.

One example of a business inflection point is the Japanese manufacture of smaller and cheaper memory products, which created an inflection point for other manufacturers of memory products. Intel and others were forced out of the memory chip business and into the relatively new field of microprocessors (Grove, 1996). This microprocessor business then created another inflection point for other companies, bringing difficult times to the classical mainframe computer industry. Another example of an inflection point is the automated teller machine, which changed the banking industry. One more example is the capacity to digitally create, store, transmit, and display entertainment content, which changed the entire media industry. In short, strategic inflection points may be caused by technology, but they fundamentally change enterprise.

Education is a fertile market within the space of global knowledge, in which the key factors are knowledge, educated people, and knowledge workers. The knowledge economy depends on productive and motivated workers who are technologically literate and positioned to contribute ideas and information and to think creatively. Like other industries (e.g., health care or communications), education combines large size (approximately the same size as health care in number of clients served), disgruntled users, lower utilization of technology, and possibly the highest strategic importance of any activity in a global economy (Dunderstadt, 1998).

The future impact of information technology on education and schools is not clear, but it is likely to create an inflection point that affects all quadrants. Educators can augment and redefine the learning process by taking advantage of advances in artificial intelligence and cognitive science and by harnessing the full power of the Internet. Computing power coupled with decreased hardware costs result in increased use of computation in all academic disciplines (Marlino et al., 2004). In addition, technological advances have improved the analysis of both real-time observational and computer-based data. For example, the science community now has tools of greater computational power (e.g., higher resolution, better systems for physical representation and modeling, and data assimilation techniques), facilitating their understanding of complex problems. Science educators are incorporating these tools into ...

Table of contents

• Brief Table of Contents
• Table of Contents
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Part I. Introduction To Artificial Intelligence And Education
• Part II. Representation, Reasoning And Assessment
• Part III. Technologies And Environments
• Bibliography
• Index