Civilian Analogs of Army Tasks: Supporting Pedagogical Storytelling Across Domains

Abstract: Storytelling is the most basic means by which people learn from the experiences of others. Advances in educational technologies offer new opportunities and experiences for learners, but risk losing the natural forms of pedagogical storytelling afforded by face-to-face teacher-student discussion. In this paper, we present a technology-supported solution to the problem of curating and algorithmically delivering relevant stories to learners in computer-based learning environments. Our approach is to mine public weblogs for textual narratives related to specific activity contexts, both inside and outside the domain of the target skillset. These stories are then linked directly to task representations in the learner model of an intelligent tutoring system, and delivered to learners along with other tutoring guidance. We demonstrate our approach to curating stories by creating collections of narratives that are analogous to tactical tasks of the U.S. Army, and evaluate the difficulty of incorporating these stories into intelligent tutoring systems