Semantics

In our studies we have designed teachable agents that can learn conceptual structures in terms of conceptual learning. These agents are based on authors' previous work, AnimalClass, introduced at Online Educa Berlin 2006. In AnimalClass the learner can teach conceptual structures about mathematics, sciences, languages and arts to virtual pets (teachable agents). The main difference between Teachable Media Agents and AnimalClass is in philosophy of learning. When teachable agents in AnimalClass were taught in terms of inductive learning, the Teachable Media Agents are taught in terms of deductive learning.

Suffering from information overload?

Social media services, such as YouTube, Flickr and Creative Commons, contain enormous number of content valuable for education. If the requested theme can be effectively searched or recognized, teacher can easily construct the course material from social media sources. However, the search engines are not optimal for educational purposes: Search engines can list numerous pieces of content that matches more or less perfectly to keywords. After search there are thousands of pieces of content to check manually if they really fit to the requested subject.