Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
1.1 Pedagogical Patterns and Didactic Memes
Since the early work by Wolfgang Ratke and Johan Amos Comenius in the first
half of the 17th century, humans are pondering principles of effective teaching.
The majority of principles is of some quite rough granularity and vagueness [12]
which, consequently, does not allow for an appropriate digital representation.
This does even apply to recent approaches which, though being called patterns,
are far from the precision of patterns in other domains [42]. Dana Angluin [2] has
provided an unprecedented study of introducing and exploiting formal patterns.
When some so-called pedagogical patterns are suciently focused and precise,
they may be encapsulated and, possibly, turned into meme media objects.
1.2 Patterns and Pattern Inference
When the pattern concept entered scientific discourse, it was quite vague [1].
Although there has been much progress in the past [15], even recent approaches
frequently remain quite uncertain as can be seen in [9] and [42], for instance.
As said before, Dana Angluin [2] has provided an unprecedented study of
introducing and exploiting formal patterns. In her approach, clarity and precision
are inevitable, because she is aiming at particular precise algorithmic results:
algorithms able to learn patterns from examples of their instances.
It depends on the goals of scientific investigations whether handwaving is
sucient or not. When patterns are intended to play a crucial role in processes
(see [16], e.g.) or when patterns are intended to reveal essential properties of
processes, of human experience, and the like (see [22], e.g.), there arises a natural
desire for clarity and precision.
Within the present author's work, patterns are always seen as formally well
defined properties which may or may not have instances in given concrete data.
Whether or not there is an instance of some pattern in some data shall be
decidable (see [20], section VIII, and [23] for some more elaborate application).
1.3 Educational and Hypermedia Storyboarding
For several years already, the author's work on storyboarding is following the
standards set in [26]. Storyboards are hierarchically structured graphs, an idea
adopted and adapted from earlier work on dynamic plan generation in complex
dynamic environments [3] (see also [4], [5] and, more recently, [6]).
The composite nodes are named episodes, whereas the atomic nodes are
named scenes. Composite nodes may be subject to substitution by other graphs.
In contrast, atomic nodes have some semantics in the underlying domain. They
may represent documents such as videos, pictures, or text files in formats like pdf,
e.g., but they may also represent some activities of human learners, co-learners,
teachers, tutors, or those actions performed by a digital systems.
The usage of composite nodes in some storyboard graph allows for a certain
remarkably declarative representation of the anticipated experiences on different
levels of granularity. This relates to the idea of layered languages of ludology [36].
