This paper summarises research trends of the 10 years following the establishment of JET and the Seven Article Declaration on Educational Technology from the 10th Anniversary JET Annual Conference. It goes on to describe the meaning of information in society, the change of the dominant communication methods from receiving to sending in learning, the need for citizens with creative capabilities, and the forms of information literacy required for living in an advanced information communication society. In this context, the paper demonstrates how the progress of educational computing and multimedia use in Japanese schools has been effectively supported by governmental policies. Finally, strategies for developing multimedia personnel and the significance of information technology are discussed.

View full abstract

Integration of Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) and World-Wide Web (WWW) technology produces novel educational systems. This paper describes architecture of WITS (WWW based ITS) especially its individualized tutoring mechanism and illustrates features of our system, a WITS for guiding differential calculations at high school. The basic structure of WITS follows a standard ITS. All modules of the WITS are constructed on a WWW server except interface, which is implemented with a WWW client such as Netscape Navigator^<TM> or NCSA Mosaic. CGI (Common Gateway Interface) and FOF (Fill-Out Form) facilities of the WWW take an important role in flexible and individualized tutoring. They provide dynamic response to a user's action. We have applied buggy modeling method in ITS technology for user modeling mechanism in the WWW framework. Combining CGI and FOF facilities of the WWW with user modeling technique on an ITS accomplishes "User Identification, " "User (Student) Modeling" and "Adaptive Tutoring." Distinctive features of our system are (1) user's (student's) error origin identification based on buggy model, (2) student's understanding state classification based on his score and frequency of the bug, (3) teaching paradigm selection and guidance message generation based on the student's state, and (4) KR message generation which depends on the situation in the WWW framework. The advantages of the WWW for an ITS are that a user can access to the system from anywhere on the Internet without any special interface programs. Collective data on the server enable statistical analysis for ststem evaluation and improvement. Although the WWW framework causes some limits especially in its interface, it brings an ITS great benefit.

View full abstract

We have developed a prototype hypermedia CAI system called HIMAT (HItachi MultimediA learning Tool). HIMAT is a hypermedia CAI system on UNIX-based workstation. It has two features for the improvement of the usability; metaphor interface which adopts the concept of the metaphor as a central user interface look and feel, and the ladder structure of the teaching materials which is planned to prevent the student from losing position in hyper structure space. With HIMAT, nine sample users studied and their behaviours were recorded. Later, the sample users were interviewed and questionnaires were collected from them. These recordings, result of interview, and questionnaires, proved the following considerations. 1) When users use link anchors, they tend to push link anchors when they find them for the first time. Therefore, if link anchors are embedded in the middle pages of the teaching materials, they often stray from the start point and then lost their current positions in hyper structure space. 2) The number of hyperlink on each page does not affect the users' behaviour of learning. Therefore the number of link anchors can be entrusted to the authors of teaching materials. 3) The length of teaching materials affect users' degree of comprehension considerably. Lengthy materials often reduce users' concentration and will to study. So the length should be restricted to proper length. These consideration should be reflected to the guidelines for designing hypermedia teaching materials.

View full abstract