The AIED conference offers “opportunities for the cross-fertilization of approaches, techniques and ideas from the many areas that make up this interdisciplinary research field including: agent technologies, artificial intelligence, computer science, cognitive and learning sciences, education, educational technologies, game design, psychology, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, and the many domain-specific areas for which AIED systems have been designed, deployed and evaluated.” (AIED, 2011). This increasing multi- disciplinarity is a great strength of AIED but it is also a massive challenge. Communication across disciplines is notoriously difficult and integration of approaches and conceptual frameworks even more so (Derry, Schunn & Gernsbacher, 2005). AIED needs to communicate successfully both within the field and beyond, particularly with mainstream Education (Cumming & McDougal, 2000). New (Web 2.0) technologies are starting to change the nature of academic discourse in terms of how and where research is disseminated and discussed (Conole et al, 2010) and have the potential to facilitate such interdisciplinary communication.
Communication across disciplines within the AIED community is supported to some extent by the communities’ journals and conferences. However, while the ‘cross-fertilisations’ afforded by conferences are essential starting points, new social media, networking tools and other resources offer many opportunities to provide better, longer term, on-going support for collaboration, integration and synthesis of results, approaches, and tools across the many disciplines that make up AIED. The need for such resources is recognised within the AIED community. At AIED 2009, addressing the topic of AIED grand challenges, Woolf (2009) suggested the community needs: ‘cadres of bibliographies, suites of project inventories, component exchange communities, global networks of test beds for intelligent learning environments”. Such resources would be helpful both within the discipline and beyond, facilitating uptake and easier, faster development of learning environments that incorporate intelligent components. However, work is required to explore existing resources and better specify requirements for these and other resources to support re-use, integration and uptake of AIED.
Much significant work in AIED is published in more specialist journals and conference proceedings (e.g. UMUAI, UMAP, IUI, AAMAS, EDM, etc...) and this is not always easy for interested non-specialists to access. To our knowledge there is no widely used community tool that brings together key publications from all of the major themes of AIED research, thus facilitating access to research from the various disciplines that make up AIED. However, a wide variety of tools exist which can support the collaborative creation and maintenance of such a useful resource and many of these are being used by individuals and groups within the AIED community. Opportunities also exist to enhance such tools by applying AI techniques, for example using recommender systems (Para & Brusilovsky, 2009) or extracting overviews of themes and trends (Wild et al, 2010). One objective of this workshop is to share knowledge on how suitable ‘cadres of bibliographies’ are being, or can be built, and to initiate work towards community wide, collaborative bibliographic resources.
Similarly, it is not as easy as should be to gain an overview of the many research groups involved in AIED research and the various completed and ongoing AIED projects (e.g. five research groups are currently listed on the IAIED society pages). Again, many opportunities exist to collaboratively develop and maintain such ‘suites of project inventories’ and research groups, perhaps using LinkedIn, Academia.edu or similar. These resources would be useful both within the community to help identify synergies and potential collaborators, and beyond the community. For example, an outward facing repository bringing together the various ways AIED is being used successfully and on a large scale (e.g. Alelo’s Tactical Language Training, Database Place, Cognitive Tutors) would be useful for demonstrating the value of AIED research.
Visions for future Technology Enhanced Learning (e.g. Woolf, 2010) point to systems that integrate components and techniques developed in highly specialised domains (e.g. User Models, Language Technologies, Tangible Interfaces, Augmented & Virtual Reality, Machine Learning & Data Mining). ‘Component exchange communities’ and/or similar mechanisms, should aim to facilitate and speed up the development of such integrated systems. Supporting re-use has long been a major topic in software engineering (Krueger, 1992) but we are unaware of specific community resources to support re-use and more agile development of AIED systems, though there has been much potentially related work towards facilitating development using Authoring Systems (e.g. Murray & Blessing 1999, Mitrovic & Koedinger 2009). This workshop will be an opportunity to share and build community knowledge of such resources.
Woolf (2009) points to the existence of several networks of collaborating researchers (e.g. G1:114, Stellar, GROE). Such networks provide the foundations for globally and simultaneously local test beds in which to collaboratively evaluate and demonstrate intelligent learning environments. However, there are many challenging issues to resolve: e.g. how to support access, data-sharing, quality control, analytic approaches and tools and ethics issues. There are several existing and emerging examples to draw on (e.g. DataShop for data sharing, OpenFace at OpenProof for sharing re-usable data mining techniques and approaches, AnswerGarden for sharing Technology Enhanced Research practice. Again this workshop will provide a forum in which to identify and discuss resources for sharing data, analysis, and research approaches.
