Subject: [IFETS-DISCUSSION:1376] Workshop on AGENTS AND INTERNET LEARNING
J.E.Whatley@salford.ac.uk
Date: Thu 15 Mar 2001 - 21:54:50 MET
From: J.E.Whatley@salford.ac.uk Subject: [IFETS-DISCUSSION:1376] Workshop on AGENTS AND INTERNET LEARNING Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2001 09:54:50 +1300
Final CALL FOR PAPERS
First International Workshop on
AGENTS AND INTERNET LEARNING (AIL-2001)
To be held at the Fifth International Conference on Autonomous Agents (Agents 2001)
Montreal, Canada May 28th 2001
See http://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~mdb/ail2001/
The widespread adoption of the Internet as a means of delivering courses to highly
distributed groups of students has considerable advantages for both Institutions and
Learners. The need to meet the ever more demanding requirements of a growing much
more disparate student population must be met effectively and efficiently with
continuously reducing resources. Universities are therefore turning to the Internet to
deliver the courses that learners require, at the times that they wish to study. The
culture of the typical University is changing as the traditional lecture-based methods of
course delivery give way to more flexible approaches. The preparation of online
course materials is very expensive, and there is considerable pressure to make the
maximum possible use of all the materials prepared. This can lead to complex and
confusing sites as courses come out of the pilot phase and numbers of students taking
different options rise.
A particular application area for agent technology is personal assistants, able to work
with a user and to adapt to users' needs. In the educational field there is a role for
personal assistant agents, specialised for working with the particular type of
information systems that make up educational systems. Students, tutors and
administrators may use these agents, both for searching information sources and for
management of learning activities. Students need support when they are working, which
may be at any time of the day or night. As course delivery is globalised support will
become more difficult to provide as the University moves towards a twenty-four hour,
seven days a week teaching institution.
The use of group support agents is particularly interesting as learning in higher
education often incorporates an element of group project work. When courses are
transferred to an online mode of delivery, either to allow students to work more
flexible timetables allowing for other commitments, or over highly dispersed locations,
there is no longer an opportunity for face-to-face discussion, which is important for the
maintenance roles of group projects. Another issue that needs to be addressed is the
problem of isolation experienced by many distance-learning students, who miss the
help and support of their peers in the conventional classroom situation.
We welcome contributions in these areas, also work to address these questions: Can
agents broker interaction between students experiencing similar difficulties? Is this
useful? Will it help students to complete their studies when otherwise they might drop
out?
Topics of Interest
We welcome the submission of papers from the full spectrum of issues associated with
security in mobile multi-agent systems, both in the public Internet and in private
networks. We particularly encourage the discussion of the following topics:
-information agents to locate the material that a student requires to complete some piece of
work
- collaboration agents to find other students with similar interests that may be
able to help with a particular topic, or the specialist tutor that can discuss a
particular case study or practical
-support agents that assist students or student groups to achieve their goals more
effectively, by monitoring activity and suggesting appropriate strategies
- brokering agents that can build groups of students to undertake different projects
by negotiating with each other across the course. This would allow groups of
students to work together with the appropriate complementary sets of skills
across a wide geographic area, so that they will never meet face-to-face.
- Tutorial agents that will perform various roles of a tutor, but will be online all
the time, and available for consultation whenever the student so desires. This
can include giving advice on work currently being undertaken, suggesting
further sources of information, guiding the student to some further information or
activity, etc.
- Agent councillors that provide pastoral support when required
- Group support agents that support group activities by acting as raporteurs, and
provide assistance to group members when required.
The workshop aims to bring together people from a number of different communities,
such as Intelligent Agents, Agent Communication, Distance Learning and Internet
Agents. Consequently we would like to encourage discussion papers, conceptual
papers, system papers, and application papers. It is planned to publish a selection of
the workshop papers with a scientific publisher after the workshop.
Submission Details
To participate in the workshop you should submit an extended abstract of up to 1000
words (approximately 3 pages maximum) to the workshop chair, to arrive no later than
19 March 2001. It is planned to structure the workshops into invited talks, technical
presentations and panel discussions. The technical presentations will be selected from
the research papers. Formatting instructions can be found at
http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html and should be strictly followed.
The first page should include the full name and contact details of at least one author
(email and full postal address). Electronic submissions are mandatory. Acceptable
formats are PDF and PostScript.
Important Dates
Submissions due Monday 19th March 2001 ** Extended to 26th
March**
Notifications sent Friday 30th March 2001
Camera ready version due Monday 16th April 2001
Workshop Monday 28th May 2001
Organisation:Janice Whatley and Martin Beer (UK)
Program Committee:
Martin Beer, University of Liverpool, UK
Janice Whatley, University of Salford, UK
Kinshuk, Massey University, NZ
Tom Fenton-Kerr, University of Sydney, Australia
Contact Person
Janice Whatley,
Information Systems Institute,
University of Salford,
Salford,M5 4WT,United Kingdom.
J.E.Whatley@salford.ac.uk
Tel: 0161 295 5175
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