........ published in NEWSLETTER # 51
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........ published in NEWSLETTER # 51
HUMAN_MACHINE COMMUNICATION FOR EDUCATIONAL SYSTEMS DESIGN
By Drs. M.D.Brouwer_Janse, Institute for Perception Research, Eindhoven (The Netherlands) and T.L. Harrington, Fast Motion Perception, Reno, Nevada (U.S.A.)
This volume (NATO ASI SERIES F129) contains the results of the NATO ASI on `Human_Machine Communication', that addressed the state_of_the_art in the design of educational systems with respect to theories, enabling technologies and advanced applications and implementation issues. The book is organized into four main subject areas: 1) Fundamentals of human perception and reasoning, 2) New media: enabling technologies, 3) Artificial Intelligence; software and design techniques, and 4) Advanced applications.
The book begins by emphasizing the importance of knowledge about human perception and reasoning for the construction of usable human_machine interfaces. Designers need to be aware of the inherent competence of the human user and to understand the resources that the users bring to the interaction. This includes knowledge of the general nature of human and world interactions; the nature of the human perceptual system; the natural learning processes by which the information given by the senses is transformed into knowledge of the world; the reasoning processes that allow humans to make inferences from that knowledge once acquired; and the ways in which acquired knowledge may be communicated to others through language. This role of human perception and reasoning is presented in the context of design requirements.
The second part of the book presents the latest developments in media and user interface technology which are important to the design of educational systems. This section addresses one of the fundamental goals of human_ machine communication research: to increase the useful bandwidth across the interface. Since the user is difficult to modify, it is the computer side that provides fertile ground for research in human_machine communication. Ideally this research should start with studies of the characteristics of human communication channels and skills and then work towards developing devices and techniques that communicate effectively to and from those channels. New media that support human_machine communication and enabling technologies upon which they depend are presented. Topics include: new human_ computer interaction techniques; the use of functional sound effects in educational software; electronic books for interactive learning; three_ dimensional view setting; the use of animated icons to promote learning of the functions that they represent; and the use of generated natural language within an immersive language learning system.
The third part of the book presents recent developments in adaptive and intelligent user interfaces that provide very promising results for implementation into the software and architecture of educational systems. Topics include: the role of social interaction between agents, the role of dialogue in learning and problem solving, and the use of visual display in programming and knowledge elicitation. Two ways of achieving the interaction between agents are discussed: by distributed AI using blackboard architectures and contract net protocols and by treating cooperation and other social issues in the framework of situated agents. The role of dialogue is presented in the context of providing users with intelligent assistance from learning companions or from expert systems. In the fourth section of the book several applications are presented and discussed. These applications of research in actual working educational systems illustrate the two_way transfer of technology between the research community and the engineering and design communities. Examples of advanced applications are, among others, multimedia information access based on cohesion as an alternative for browsing via menus and keywords, handwriting for non_Roman languages, and interactive multimedia for foreign language learning.
The very special feature of this book is the compilation of most recent work in three different research domains, each addressing the challenges of educational system design from a different theoretical viewpoint. This volume brings together work from the areas of human_ computer interaction, artificial intelligence, and cognitive psychology and puts it into a pragmatic context of system design and educational applications. The book is a useful source of information for all researchers working in the field of educational systems design and in multimedia systems for education.
Reference books: F67, F81, F87, F125, F129