Educational uses for Rev (was Re: Plea to sell Dan's book widely)

[Richard Gaskin]

Marian Petrides wrote:

> Not only in teaching programming but in designing custom educational 
> courseware. Who wants the student to have ONLY simple multiple-guess 
> questions to work with?
> 
> Life doesn't come with a series of four exclusive-or questions tattooed 
> across it, so why give student this unrealistic view of the real world, 
> when a little work in Rev will permit far more challenging interactivity?

Agreed wholeheartedly.  Education-related work was the largest single 
set of tasks folks did with HyperCard, and for all the tools that have 
come out since there remains an unaddressed gap which may be an ideal 
focus for DreamCard.

But moving beyond simple questions models like multiple choice is 
difficult.  The AICC courseware interoperability standard describes 
almost a dozen question models, but most are variants of "choose one", 
"choose many", "closest match", etc., sometimes enlived by using 
drag-and-drop as the mechanism for applying the answer but not 
substantially different from what gets tested with a simple multiple 
choice in terms of truer assessment of what's been learned.

The challenge is to find more open-ended question models which can still 
be assessed by the computer.  For example, the most open-ended question 
is an essay, but I sure don't want to write the routine that scores 
essays. :)

What sorts of enhanced question models do you think would be ideal for 
computer-based learning?

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Media Corporation
  ___________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com       http://www.FourthWorld.com