Social Adaptive Navigation Support for Open Corpus Electronic Textbooks

Abstract

Abstract.Closed corpus AH systems demonstrate what is possible to achieve with adaptive hypermedia technologies; however they are impractical for dealing with the large volume of open corpus resources. Our system, Knowledge Sea II, presented in this paper explores social adaptive navigation support, an approach for providing personalized guidance in the open corpus context. Following the ideas of social navigation, we have attempted to organize a personalized navigation support that is based on past learners' interaction with the system. The social adaptive navigation support implemented in our system was considered quite useful by students participating in the classroom study of Knowledge Sea II. At the same time, some user comments indicated the need to provide more powerful navigation support.

Social Navigation Support Through Annotation-Based Group Modeling

“…This kind of SNS helped the learners to clearly recognize the most and the least visited pages and guide their navigational choices appropriately. Our classroom study [2] demonstrated that a footprint-based SNS is able to increase the usage of open corpus resources and that the learners appreciate it immensely. At the same time, a few students pointed out that the number of visits to a page is not always a reliable measure of its relevance to their needs and asked for better relevance indicators.…”

“…1), which combined the use of a self-organized knowledge map [3] with a simple "footprint" SNS [2]. The first version of KSII provided a simple interface for annotating tutorial pages by adding written notes.…”

“…Adaptive navigation support techniques developed in the field of Adaptive Hypermedia [1] could be used to guide learners to the right resources at the right time. However, concept-based navigation support mechanisms used in traditional Adaptive Hypermedia (AH) systems are not suitable for the large volume of open corpus documents [2]. When searching for a mechanism to deal with the large scale of adaptive navigation support needed in open corpus hypermedia, we turned to the ideas of social navigation [5].…”

“…The idea of the "footprints" is to count how many users are passing through a link or visiting a page, in order to recommend the most popular links and pages. Combining the ideas of social navigation with the ideas of group modeling and adaptive navigation support, we have implemented a "socially adaptive" system, Knowledge Sea II [2]. This system changes the intensity of a cell's background color, to indicate how many users of the current group have visited each tutorial page and each cluster of tutorial pages: the more visits, the more intensive the color (Fig.…”

Adaptive Hypermedia for Education and Training

“…One research stream focused on the versatility of LMS, attempting to provide in one system as many teacher and learner support features (from content authoring to quizzes to discussion forums) as provided by a modern LMS --plus, the ability to adapt to the user (Morimoto et al, 2007;Specht et al, 2002;Ueno, 2005 (Brusilovsky, Chavan & Farzan, 2004;Brusilovsky & Henze, 2007;Henze & Nejdl, 2001). Most recent projects, however, choose not to compete with present-day LMS, but instead to focus on adaptive features of the coming generation of Web-based educational systems.…”