[Edu-sig] An engine to navigate between lessons

[Andre Roberge]

On 5/14/06, Andrew Harrington <aharrin at luc.edu> wrote:
>
> Navigating Between Lessons
>
> I have been reading the discussion and trying the prototypes for Python
> content delivery with great excitement.  On seeing how well you were
> doing on the content delivery, my imagination took off and I wrote down
> a whole bunch of brainstorming ideas below on an important independent
> aspect of an interactive learning environment.  Just tonight the "Only
> Python" thread touched on the area I have been thinking about with the
> idea of choosing what comes next after evaluating code in the Crunchy
> Frog.


[snip - snip - snip     lots of interesting material cut out.]

There were a lot of great ideas expressed in this brainstorming tsunami.  I
will latch onto a single theme.

For this to work, we need tutorials "snippets" ... lots of them.  I don't
think we need to worry too much at this point about complex links between
them, nor about the "syntax" required for those links.  I believe this is
going to be the easy part ... after enough tutorial snippets are written.
If it is web-based, the whole machinery pretty much already exists. One way
might be to embed keywords, including "difficulty ranking", inside tutorials
and use a search engine to decide where to go next.  Or, rather than using a
search engine, a "mind map" type of visual index can be created, with some
automatic updating whenever a new tutorial snippet is added, or a keyword is
added to that tutorial.  A variation on the them is that keywords inside a
given tutorial could be given some relative weighting factor.

Regardless of the chosen method ... lots of tutorials will be needed.  Until
then, I think that trying to come up with the ideal method to link them is
probably pointless; a case of premature optimization....

André
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