Modéling and implementing adaptative pedagogical hyper documents

Reviewer: Olivier Louis Marie Lecarme

A text written in French at an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) sponsored conference is not a common thing. In fact, the conference itself was a French-speaking one, which is also uncommon. French-speaking authors generally don't publish in their own language, because of the risk of not being read outside of their own country. Here, without any available translation, most potential readers will only have the English abstract as a source of information. Thus, it is a pity that this abstract is so poorly written. The paper itself is interesting to read, although it suffers from many typographical errors, and from very small, almost unreadable illustrations. The subject matter is e-learning, the fashionable new term for computer-aided teaching (or learning). The idea of the authors is to adapt the learning process to three characteristics of the learners: what they know, and want to learn; what they are; and what they like. In order to achieve this purpose, the e-learning system is structured into three levels: support, structure, and semantics. This is implemented by the use of Extensible Markup Language (XML) and various document type definitions (DTDs), which can be used to present the learners with dynamically generated hypermedia documents. The teacher interface does not presently seem well developed, and this aspect of the whole idea may well be the main difficulty. In fact, successful learning depends on what the teachers put into it, and it may be difficult for the teacher to adjust his or her approach without immediate interaction and feedback. I would like to follow the progress of the ideas developed in this paper. Since the conference occurred two years ago, I hope to soon find a new paper about these developments. Online Computing Reviews Service