The term "Hypertext" was coined by Ted Nelson in the 60s and since the 80s, an annual conference has been running on Hypertext. This year the Eighteenth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia was in Manchester, UK. Hypertext conferences have always been among the few that have managed to be true interdisciplinary conferences. They have always brought together computer scientists, writers, sociologists, psychologists, designers, ethnographers, engineers and many others. That's why Hypertext conferences are interesting and fun to attend. This year, as usual, Hypertext 2007 had a strong programme with three keynote speakers: Carole Goble, Wendy Hall and Ted Nelson, and five autonomous programmes including "Hypertext and The Person". Ohh if you don't know Ted Nelson and have not been to his talks before, he is a great speaker and visionary. Here I wanted to point out two papers that won the best paper awards, and for other interesting papers in the programme, you can refer to the complete proceedings. Real users, real results: examining the limitations of learning styles within AEH

This paper examines the current state of AEH (adaptive educational hypermedia) research into explicit learning style modelling for user personalisation. It addresses the problem of non-naïve test subjects, who are often in user trials, thus contributing to experimental bias. Instead, the authors suggest using real people, i.e. users with a range of backgrounds and abilities, in order to gain a truer insight into evidence-based research. We report on a study carried out with No statistically significant differences were found between experimental groups, learning style preferences or learning environments. We discuss the significance of this, and then critically analyse the use of learning styles in relation to this study and also in the wider context.real users: around 80 children at a UK primary school. The study investigated sequential and global learning styles as a personalisation mechanism in an AEH system. The user trial involved matching and mismatching users and learning environments to see if learning improved. The AEH system used by the children was DEUS, a new e-learning platform that is conceptually similar to WHURLE, an AEH that also used learning styles as its user model. No statistically significant differences were found between experimental groups, learning style preferences or learning environments. We discuss the significance of this, and then critically analyse the use of learning styles in relation to this study and also in the wider context.

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1286240.1286261 What is an analogue for the semantic web and why is having one important?

This paper postulates that for the Semantic Web to grow and gain input from fields that will surely benefit it, it needs to develop an analogue that will help people not only understand what it is, but what the potential opportunities are that are enabled by these new protocols. The model proposed in the paper takes the way that Web interaction has been framed as a baseline to inform a similar analogue for the Semantic Web. While the Web has been represented as a Page + Links, the paper presents the argument that the Semantic Web can be conceptualized as a Notebook + Memex. The argument considers how this model also presents new challenges for fundamental human interaction with computing, and that hypertext models have much to contribute to this new understanding for distributed information systems.

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1286240.1286271
Full Proceedings: Proceedings of the 18th conference on Hypertext and hypermedia, Manchester, UK.

Labels: e-learning, Hypertext, Semantic Web

This month I have decided to talk about a conference paper and a conference proceedings; the former is out of left field and the latter is a kind of reminder that the proceedings of the 12th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces (IUI 2007) are now available in the ACM Digital Library (ACM DL). (1) The virtual tele-tASK professor: semantic search in recorded lectures This paper is in the latest issue of the ACM SIGCSE (ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education) bulletin, in fact it was presented at the SIGCSE Symposium 2007. I personally did not know that this bulletin has been published since 1969 (the first issue was published in Feb 1969). I think this particular paper can be interesting to people who research alternative user interface input techniques. The authors propose an e-librarian service that understands student's complete questions in natural language. Although this work is focusing on e-learning, the results could be useful to general research on systems that aim to support natural language interaction. The authors also indicate that "experiments confirmed our e-librarian service as an efficient e-learning tool". The keynote talk of ACM SIGCSE Symposium also looks interesting, "To Teach is to Touch Lives Forever", but unfortunately only the abstract is available.

"This paper describes our e-librarian service that understands students' complete questions in natural language and retrieves very few but pertinent learning objects, i.e., short multimedia documents. The system is based on three key components: the formal representation of a domain ontology, a mechanism to automatically identify learning objects out of a knowledge source, and a semantic search engine that yields only pertinent results based on the freely formulated questions in natural language.We report on experiments about students' acceptance to enter complete questions instead of only keywords, and about the benefits of such a virtual personal teacher in an educational environment."

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1227310.1227330 Full Proceedings: Proceedings of the 38th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
(2) Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces (IUI 2007) I believe creating intelligent user interfaces has always been a challenge that the accessibility community addresses. Although the motivation can be different from this conference's focus, I still think the proceedings can be useful and interesting to the accessibility community. This conference was held on 28-31st of January and the proceedings of IUI2007 are now available in the ACM Digital Library (ACM DL).
Full Proceedings: Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces (IUI 2007)

Labels: e-learning, intelligent user interfaces, UIU