Bücher von Debbie Richards

Since knowledge was recognized as a crucial part of intelligent systems in the 1970s and early 1980s, the problem of the systematic and efficient acquisition of knowledge was an important research problem. In the early days of expert systems, the focus of knowledge acquisition was to design a suitable knowledge base for the problem - main by eliciting the knowledge from available experts before the system was c- pleted and deployed. Over the years, alternative approaches were developed, such as incremental approaches which would build a provisional knowledge base initially and would improve the knowledge base while the system was used in practice. Other approaches sought to build knowledge bases fully automatically by employing machine-learning methods. In recent years, a significant interest developed regarding the problem of constructing ontologies. Of particular interest have been ontologies that could be re-used in a number of ways and could possibly be shared across diff- ent users as well as domains. The Pacific Knowledge Acquisition Workshops (PKAW) have a long tradition in providing a forum for researchers to exchange the latest ideas on the topic. Parti- pants come from all over the world but with a focus on the Pacific Rim region. PKAW is one of three international knowledge acquisition workshop series held in the Pacific-Rim, Canada and Europe over the last two decades. The previous Pacific Knowledge Acquisition Workshop, PKAW 2004, had a strong emphasis on inc- mental knowledge acquisition, machine learning, neural networks and data mining.

The study reported in this paper is an ongoing effort. We reported a preliminary analysis of the data in the paper. The current experiments varied the subjects to c- duct online group learning activities by the communication media such as email and threaded discussion. Although, we could have easily learned the impact of mobile devices in learning if we divided the subjects to use different hardware such as p- sonal computers, personal digital assistant, or mobile phones, we believe our findings will still be able to provide useful insights on the difficulties that the mobile learners will face in solving problems as a group. Our analysis result will also provide ba- line information on whether the traits of the successful or failed online groups are applicable to the mobile learners. For example, we expect the SMS will be a better medium to overcome the major problem of instant communication or the rapid propagation of the information as the mobile phones have built-in mechanism to remind the users of the incoming new messages and also the mobile phone users are expected to be interrupted for the incoming messages. However, we need further investigation of other problems, which hinder the optimum online group work. For example, 'accuracy of the transferred information' was identified as one of the pr- lems of using emails as the communication medium. Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) or SMS are more apt to deliver shorter messages than the typical emails.