When: Friday, April 8, 2005, 12:00 noon

Where: Large Commons Room, 5th Floor,  IS Building

Who: Jacopo Armani,Faculty of Communication Sciences, Universita' della Svizzera Italiana

Title: Taming Adaptive Technologies for Education

Abstract: The present doctoral research stems from the consideration that, despite many educational adaptive hypermedia systems (EAHS) have been developed in the years, almost none of them has actually spread into real educational contexts. This consideration is supported by a careful analysis of the available e-learning software applications: in fact, none of the popular learning management systems support any type of adaptivity towards the students. In our opinion, this situation stems from three missing factors, which the adaptive systems produced so far lack of: shareability, control, and communicability. Shareability refers to the factors that make an adaptive system reusable in different contexts. The lack of control over the adaptive decisions and their effects are also perceived as a threat by authors. Finally, many adaptive systems fall short to release their potentialities to the authors’ community, because they do not give them the necessary authoring tools and documentation to use them effectively.

From these premises we elaborated a research agenda that aims at reintegrating in a holistic suite of tools all the key factors we identified. To meet this objective we integrated the results of more than ten years of research on adaptive techniques for education, with insights and principles stemming from the field of human-computer interaction, and from data coming from interviews with practitioners in the education field. The results of these investigations then have inspired the development of a set of tools, which condense the three missing factors. Shareability is achieved by the ADLEGO system: a flexible and open educational adaptive hypermedia system designed to provide basic adaptive techniques in order to craft complex adaptive interactions. Control is a premise also of this tool, since ADLEGO defines a grammar of adaptive actions, which the author can exploit in infinite ways to create an adaptive website. Communicability is the concern of the VIDET authoring suite, which we produced to unleash the ADLEGO potentialities to non-technical authors, namely teachers, instructors, instructional designers, and developers.

A summative evaluation of the produced prototypes proved that our approach is effective at enabling a non-technical author to exploit the potentiality of an adaptive educational hypermedia system.

Speakers Bio: Jacopo Armani has a Master in Computer Engineering from Politecnico di Milano and a Ph.D. in Communication Sciences from Università della Svizzera italiana. He has been a consultant for several private companies and institutions as Web Engineer and Graphic Designer since 1998. His main research interests involve Adaptive Hypermedia Systems, Graphical Interfaces, Modeling Languages for theWeb, and Visual Communication. He is currently broadening his interests in the field of Computer Graphics, taking a program in 3D Animation and Visual Effects at the Vancouver Film School.