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In the semiotic terms of the last section, teachers and students (and
sometimes authors and their readers), are involved in a special form of
language game that might be called a tell/ask duality. See Figure
(figure) As author and reader, or teacher and student become
engaged in a conversation, they alternatively cede control of their
shared attentional focus. A teacher explains by telling a story that
takes some time to complete. Some of these stories are relatively
self-contained, but most are only pieces of much larger stories. There
must be opportunities for students to ask questions in this exchange,
even as these necessarily interrupt the flow of the story.
Another way to
appreciate the value of this pedagogical structure is to consider what
happens when it is removed: When a query is asked of a search engine,
the resulting hitlist is missing just this pedagogical structure. When
trying to characterize what is most missing from hitlists, imagining a
lecture which explains their relationships is one good characterization.
Our
image of the classroom typically has a single teacher at the front, and
many, perhaps 30 students remaining quiet to hear the lecture. The
teacher has prepared readings and made these available (and maybe the
students have even read them:). The lecture is part of a larger
curriculum and the readings help to relate the current lecture to a
larger question.
It is likely that there are simultaneously other
teachers in other educational institutions teaching similar courses. For
example, NSF has sponsored the construction of a repository for Computer
Science Curricula . In every subject, there are other texts than the
one selected by this instructor. The student, especially the good
student, may check out these other sources of information, but they must
be on their guard to give special emphasis to those materials most
likely to affect the grade they will ultimately receive from
this teacher!
Now consider the serious (in the sense that they are there
to be informed, not entertained) WWW surfer. They have a question in
mind and hope, somewhere on the WWW, is their answer. Their question is
almost certainly much smaller than the question around which a course is
defined. It may turn out that this surfer chooses, if he or she has many
questions in a related area, that he or she does indeed take the course.
But the point is that one of the pieces of information this surfer may
well see in his search is the curriculum for a course like that one
described above.
There are many important questions about just how
curricular materials available via the WWW can and should be used. They
range from intellectual property issues (who owns them, the institution
or the faculty?), to presentation media choices, to a reconsideration of
exactly what is the importance of face-to-face meetings in the
classroom.
Here we concentrate on the fundamental exchange of
information: who is attempting to learn what. In the class situation the
teacher is charged with presenting information that most efficiently
allows these students to learn the concepts the instructor thinks are
important. The surfer, on the other hand, is trying to make sense of the
almost random set of documents in their hitlist. As we've discussed, if
the browsing user really knew the answer of their information need
precisely, they wouldn't be surfing! The literate, intelligent surfer
has remarkable skill at identifying documents that are likely to contain
the answer to their question. In this sense they are both learner and
their own teacher, trying to teach themselves.
Especially once they are
beyond (compulsory,K-12) elementary education, the WWW is an excellent
place for active students to construct their education. There are
choices to be made between educational institutions, and then between
teachers of the same class. They must pick a major discipline. Then
there is perhaps graduate school, and the process repeats itself. As the
workforce moves becomes more involved in continuing education,
as distance learning becomes more possible and fashionable, as life-long
learning becomes a political objective, students will be actively
seeking curricular units of all different sizes and scopes. Many of
these questions resolve ultimately in economic issues: How much is a
masters' degree worth? How much is tuition at two different schools? How
much larger salary can I earn if I have a certain education?
These
changes go hand-in-hand with the changing institutional pressures on
public and private educational systems. For example, corporations such
as the Educational Testing System (ETS) are being pressed to incorporate
more holistic essay questions in place of the easier-to-grade multiple
choice. As a consequence, textual classification techniques like those
considered in Section §7.4 are being
used to explore algorithmic e-rater computer
grading of ETS essay questions [Larkey98b] !
From the publishers point
of view, K-12 curricula are being divided up into smaller curricular
units. No longer is it necessary to buy an entire curriculum (grades
K-6, mathematics) and have it adopted in toto by a school board. State
guidelines have many facets, and publishers can equate units to these
facets at a very fine grain of detail. Local curricular goals and then
teacher preferences can help to assemble units taken from various
publishers and assembled like beads on strings. For the entrepreneurial
teacher this provides an excellent opportunity for them to author
curriculum themselves, because he/she is in an excellent position to
suggest ways that topics can be connected to guidelines.
As we build more
and more autonomous agents (cf. Section §7.6 ) this interplay between teacher and
student (now both software entities!) must transfer our notions of
MIXED INITIATIVES . Within the field of machine learning, we
typically make the assumption that the learner is extremely passive.
More recent analysis extends this to situations of ACTIVE
LEARNING where a large part of the problem is just how informative
exemplars can be selected so as to most quickly learn.
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