Resource reuse and broadband user modelling in ie-TV

The convergence of communications and information technology within education, as well as more widely, means that concepts developed within ITS & AIED are now applicable to a wider range of wired, and more interestingly 'wireless', technologies. In [1] we outlined the educational rationale of a Broadband User Model (BbUM) that would support the individualisation of the interactions, both between the technology and a user and between collaborating users, for a system able to deliver a variety of resources in a range of media, including interactive TV. At the heart of any such system there needs to be a database of resources from which the user, the educational designer or the system itself, including the user model, can select. Some of these resources will be items that were developed for other purposes, such as self-contained TV programmes, books or simulation programs. Others will be resources developed with such a system in mind. In either case the use and reuse of these resources depends on careful tagging at a level of granularity that enables them to be used both in their entire original form as well as in parts. For example, imagine that a TV programme is being indexed and that it consists of a number of items, originally in a chronological sequence. The tagging might indicate that one item is analagous to another or generalises it. Labelling the items makes explicit some of the implicit pedagogic relationships that underpin the design of the original programme. This enables the possibility of recomposing the TV programme in some other sequence that reflects a different overall pedagogical structure to the original. Moreover, each item is also tagged in terms of its position in some domain scheme. A prototype system has been implemented that employed a database searchable in a variety of ways, including the keywords matched against video/TV captions and/or automatically transcribed speech. Metadata included such fields as ID, title, ownership, media type, format, and duration. Content categorisation included topic, target user group, and interactivity. Form categorisation included problem, concept, description, and explanation or example