Valéry Psyché

Selecting Theories in an Ontology-Based ITS Authoring Environment

This paper introduces the rationale for concrete situations in the authoring process that can exploit a theory-aware Authoring Environment. It illustrates how Ontological Engineering (OE) can be instrumental in representing the declarative knowledge needed, and how an added value in terms of intelligence can be expected for both authoring and for learning environments.

Building Intelligent Tutoring Systems: An Overview

This chapter addresses the challenge of building or authoring an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS), along with the problems that have arisen and been dealt with, and the solutions that have been tested. We begin by clarifying what building an ITS entails, and then position today’s systems in the overall historical context of ITS research. The chapter concludes with a series of open questions and an introduction to the other chapters in this part of the book.

Analysis of processes of cooperation and knowledge sharing in a community of practice with a diversity of actors

According to some literature, communities of practice should normally stem from a voluntary initiative within an organization, whose members share some knowledge or expertise they wish to improve. However, over time, we have seen that communities tend to be created within organizations, in order to attain objectives of learning and knowledge development. This represents a challenge in the context of a community of practice taking the form of a research network in partnership that brings together members with common interests certainly, but spread out in different organizations and even several countries in which they perform different types of work. Also, the community does not exist in a vacuum and the explanation for what happens within it does not lie solely within the way the group interacts; indeed the individuals are part of different organizations and thus have different priorities, in relation with these affiliations. In this context, our research objective was to determine the factors that facilitate or hinder cooperation within a community of practice composed by two groups of actors, community and university actors. We thus found that individuals’ different work affiliations might not facilitate the work within the CoP and that ICT/web 2.0 tools are not always a solution to increase participation in a CoP. Although participants are somewhat familiar with the tools, they mostly seem content with receiving and accessing information, not searching for a more active participation. Some explications and solutions will be proposed.

Opening the Door to Philosophy for Teachers with GYM-Author

Can a system have the ability to dynamically generate, on demand, a large number of self-learning and self-assessment exercises in order to supplement a learning environment in philosophy? We addressed this issue with our Phi-GYM project with its integrated authoring tool for tutoring systems in philosophy. Our motivation in designing the authoring tool was to: (1) Find an effective way to semi-automatically generate a wide range of exercises, and; (2) Provide philosophy teachers with an easy, autonomous, and collective way to create exercises related to classical philosophical texts without worrying about any technology.