<< Back
.: Dissertation Area: Thesis Proposal
Get this document in Word format
here
.
Technology to Support Student Research on the Web Carl Nattrass Dissertation Proposal Department of Computer Science University of Durham Abstract Locating resources on the Web has become increasingly difficult for users. The sheer size of the Web means that despite the amount of relevant material increasing, the effort involved in locating that material is increasing also. In effect, the relevant material is being diluted by other material. There are a number of tools which users have at their disposal to aid in this task, but often these are effective only up to a point. Search Engines, Agents, news groups and repositories all offer an enhanced experience rather than purely browsing, but these are regarded by most users as simply a starting point for their search. Students are one such group who spend an excessive amount of their time locating materials relevant to their area of study. The act of browsing should not be considered as study time, but as the length of time taken to locate relevant material increases, the effective total study time decreases; students may only have a limited period of study. This Thesis will assess and develop new techniques to help minimise the study material search time, and maximise the quality of the study material located. The proposed research will make use of Agent technologies, the Semantic Web and proxy technologies. The investigation will make advances into this field in 3 ways: (1) examine methods of profiling users for use in identifying relevancies, (2) examine methods of identifying attributes within materials for use of classification, (3) examine methods and create an environment appropriate to providing support for students and their research, and (4) evaluate the effectiveness of the environment against standard Web research activity. Contents Statement of Problem 2 Context of Work 2 Review of Literature 3 Method 4 Results 4 Evaluation Criteria 4 Plan 5 References 5 Terms and Acronyms 6 Statement of Problem Locating learning resources on the Web has become increasingly difficult for students. The sheer size of the Web means that despite the amount of good research material being available, it is being diluted with material of limited use to students. Researchers have a number of means which will assist the locating of research material; at minimum, these can help reduce the quantity of Web pages the student must search through before hopefully finding what they require. These means may include Search Engines, Agents and repositories and the plethora of tools which link to them. Search engines mainly use user entered key-words to narrow down the suggested relevant Web pages. Agents can offer many ways of locating Web pages, for example one agent called Letizia [LIEB95] scans Web pages local to where the user is browsing to locate the most relevant pages based on the user’s criteria. A second type of Agent is WebWatcher [FREI97] which alters the view of the Web page to suit the user’s criteria; this is particularly useful where the user is being offered lists of URL’s such as a response from a Search Engine. Repositories such as CiteSeer [COUN06] and The Berkeley Personal Libraries [BERK07] can be used in conjunction with Web tools, and may be queried as part of the searching process. Unfortunately, in most cases these tools simply present their recommendations in a long list and offer no rating or other method identifying why they have been deemed as suitable. The outcome of this in most cases is that the student must read through many irrelevant articles before even finding those which are relatively suitable. Some of the most important issues regarding the accessibility of the Web at this time are (1) the quantity of material, (2) the quality of that material, and (3) the selection of that material. To be able to readily locate material on the Web, there must be some method of identifying the key aspects of that material. Historically, a student might locate research material through advice from the tutor and from peers; in a distributed computerised learning environment, such advice may not be readily available. This research aims to show that to overcome this problem it is necessary to move from a point of distributed intelligence and learning to one of collaboration and sharing. The disputation of this thesis is that research could progress more productively if students could locate relevant material more reliably and consistently. By the assemblage of students into groups relating to their study levels and subjects, and through the recommending of materials whether autonomously are implicitly, a more accurate picture of the Web may be possible. Through research into this area, it is proposed that advances will be made into the productivity of student research and the reliability of knowledge discovery on the Web. A programmatic framework will be created and from this further enhancements in scholarly knowledge gathering will be made. Context of Work The proposed work aims to show that by the implementation of new technology, student research time can be put to better use by enhancing access to relevant study material and by reducing the time it takes in locating it. Technology Enhance Learning (TEL) is seen as the key to future learning. Learning by nature is collaborative and the distributed nature of the Web is ideal for supporting Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL). Researchers such as Schroeder [SCHR07] are clearly defining that is needed to move research forward but despite this, TEL research in the past few years has stalled and progress has been limited. Advances in Web technology have far exceeded advances in TEL methods. Review of Literature One of the main obstacles to being able to fully utilise the Web for researching and teaching is that it is still highly unstructured; educational material is highly distributed and relatively unordered. This makes it difficult in identifying, extracting and linking sources of learning materials. The vision of a Web which works in hand with education is one of futuristic expectation and enthusiasm. There is much in the way of promises being proffered about this subject, but research is still lagging behind expectations. It may be quite a few years before any significant advancements are seen. There are currently a number of Web-based educational repositories which successfully support the exchange of activities, material and collaboration among members of European higher educational establishments. One such repository is The Universal Project [UNIP07] is an open repository for learning resources on the Web. Despite its availability, it is still rarely used; this is due in part to the lack of software capable of accessing it. Educational software has made some notable advances such as in the use of Web Based Education Systems (WBES) such as Blackboard in mainstream education; these allow tutors to create Web enhanced courses. There are also a number of more specialised systems such as ElmArt, Pat, AIMS and AHA textbooks. Other global efforts include EdNa and ARIADNE. The ARIADNE Foundation [ARIA07] provides tools and methods for the creation, and management of pedagogical artefacts. Another project is The Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative (ADL) which is sponsored by the Office of the Secretary of Defence (UK). Its aim is to the interoperability of learning tools and material on a global scale and is unique in so much as it allows the use of materials from various sources such as for example ARIADNE. The research evidence would lead to the conclusion that it is necessary to move from a point of distributed intelligence and learning to one of collaboration and sharing. This notion could be progressed by the concentration of research into a number of methods; 1) Recommender systems such as Polylens [RIED01] 2) Scaleable indexed repositories such as The Open Archive Initiative [OPAI07] 3) The globalisation of learning software such as the ARIADNE Project [AIRA07] 4) The formalised specification of online materials by using languages such as RDF and OWL [WWWC07]. 5) Better WBES software such as Blackboard. To do this on a large scale, there are two challenges; (1) defined and accepted standards for authoring the semantic web and/or for retrieving the data, and (2) interoperability amongst educational establishments. For both of these to be achieved, the correct tools need to be accessible. One of the key areas of research being undertaken currently is in the area of the Semantic Web (SW) as described by Berners-Lee [BERN01]. The benefits of the SW are now widely accepted amongst key communities, such as education, but it remains to be seen whether the benefits will outweigh the costs. Extra coding time, new skills and maintenance issues are all a concerns for organisations that may be reluctant to adopt the new methods. Anderson and Whitelock [ANDE04] stated that “The vision of the educational semantic web is based on three fundamental accordances. The first is the capacity for effective information storage and retrieval. The second is the capacity for non-human autonomous agents to augment the learning and information retrieval and processing power of human beings. The third affordance is the capacity of the Internet to support, extend and expand communications capabilities of humans in multiple formats across the bounds of time and space.” Sparck-Jones [SPAR04] argued that Semantic processing is not the direction to take and that it will only offer superficial benefits in the end; she argues that using natural language processing to categorise and extract information from the Web offers more potential. This is an extremely valid point, and whilst the Semantic Web will have benefits to offer software Agents, its lack of universality will restrict its usefulness. Rather than overwhelmingly concentrating research on the SW which is what is happening, alternatives such as natural language processing should be researched in parallel with equivalent weightings placed upon them. One area within this field which is lacking is in the locating of research material on the Web. There has been research undertaken such as the “a La” “Zig Zag” Tool by Hall et al. [HALL07]. This software assists teachers in locating learning material though a process of enhancing keyword searches queried against Search Engines. There is also the CiteSeer [COUN06] repository useful for researchers looking for articles and references and for Agent to query. This Thesis will focus on this area but will extend it by introducing the concept of material suitability; any proposed learning material should match the user’s subject and study level. Method The Thesis will address the issues outlined above by the creation of a software tool to assist researchers locate relevant educational material on the Web. The system will then be tested by groups of students and an investigation into the suitability of the system shall take place. This will be done by the analysis of quantitative and qualitative data collected from these target groups to ascertain whether there was a genuine increase in the quality and suitability of the research material found during researching sessions. Results Evaluatory results shall be collected from the new software noting its effects on researching sessions. These results will be gathered by the following methods: 1 A number of quantitative results will be gathered form the proxy server reports. These results may include: 1.1 The quantity of articles passed through the proxy. 1.2 The number of viewings each article gets. 1.3 The user’s ratings of articles 2 Quantitative results will also be gathered from observations and recordings made on students taking part in set experiments. Interviews will take place after the experiments to evaluate the student’s learning experience using the new technology. Evaluation Criteria The results gathered will be used to provide a general indication of the effectiveness of the new technology. The aim is to gauge how beneficial the technology has been within the learning environment and to the nature of those benefits. The methods of analysis will take a number of forms; 1 By analysing the results from the Proxy Server, and knowing the test set it will be possible to establish how relevant the indexed articles were, and the quantity of students who used them. 2 Using the information gathered during the experiment, it should then be possible to establish if there was any improvement to the ease of locating the sought information, and any increase in the quality and suitability of the materials found. Plan 2007 December Final version of Thesis Proposal and Literature Survey 2008 January Research current trends in Web browsing methods 2008 June Begin software design 2008 July Create software 2009 January Test software & make any alterations 2009 July Define experimental methods Begin Thesis write-up 2009 August Undertake experiment on Students using Software 2010 January Analysis and evaluation of experiment 2012 January Research completed References [AND04] Anderson T., Whitelock D., The Educational Semantic Web: Visioning and Practicing the Future of Education, Journal of Interactive Media in Education, May, 2004 ARIA07 http://www.ariadne-eu.org, Accessed 20/11/07 [BERK07] http://www.sunsite.berkeley.edu/, accessed on17/09/07 [BERN01] Berners-Lee T., Lassila O., Hendler J., The Semantic Web, Scientific American, May, 2001 [COUN06] Councill I., Li H., Bolelli L., Zhou D., Song Y., Lee W., Giles C., CiteSeer - A Scalable Autonomous Scientific Digital Library, 1st International Conference on Scaleable Information Systems, May 29-June 1, Hong Kong, 2006 [FREI97] Freitag D., Joachims T., Mitchell T., WebWatcher: A Tour Guide for the WWW, Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on A.I., 1997 [HALL07] Hall W., Andric M., Carr L., Devedzic V., Keyword Linking Methods for Selecting Educational Web Resources a la ZigZag, International Journal of Knowledge and Learning, Vol 3, No. 1, 2007 [LIEB95] Lieberman H., Letizia: An Agent that Assists Web Browsing, Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on A.I.., Montreal Aug, 1995 [OPAI07] http:www.openarchives.org, Accessed 02/11/07 [RIED01] Cosley D., Konstan J., Riedl J., O Connor M., PolyLens: A Recommender System for Groups of Users, Proceedings of the 7th European Conference on CSCW, Kluwer, NY, USA, 2001 [SCHR07] Schroeder R., Quality in Online Teaching and Learning, http://www.usm.maine.edu/ctel/resources.html, accessed 4/09/07 [SPAR04] Sparck Jones K., What s new about the Semantic Web? Some questions, SIGIR Forum, vol. 38, no. 2, 2004 [UNIP07] http://www.ist-universal.org, Accessed 31/10/07 [WWWC07] http://www.w3.org/RDF/, Accessed 31/10/07 Terms and Acronyms Terms Agents Software which collaborate with human users to automate a task Proxy Server Web access via a go-between agent server Search Engine Software which searches for information on the Web and returns sites which provide that information Semantic Web An evolution of the current HTML based Web which allows the Web content to be described in a natural language Acronyms AHA AIMS CSCW Computer Supported Collaborative Work EdNa ElmArt Pat SW Semantic Web TEL Technology Enhanced Learning. WBES Web Based Education Systems
<< Back
Copyright Apellicon 2007 - 2010, All rights reserved.
Website templates
