Next, we are going to present a short illustrative example of an instructional meta-strategy. It can be used to infer the user’s preference for either textual or pictorial information. Here, the author specifies the actions which are performed when the user accesses an AHA! concept. Here we present parts of the XML file indicating a increase/decrease in the confidence of the system that the user is a verbalizer; this corresponds to a decrease/increase in the confidence that he/she is an imager.
The XML file contains a numbers of variables.
“concept” & “parent” will be translated into the actual concept names while applying the structure for a particular application. These are generic names.
“parent” will be replaced with the name of a parent concept for actual “concept” as in the concept hierarchy.
Other variables: personal.VERBvsIM.initial and personal.traceTextvsImage. Such variables can be added by the author of an application and initialized through the registration form. The first variable stores the initial value of the “VERBvsIM” attribute. The second variable indicates whether the user wants the system to infer his preferences. For example, the user does not know what his learning style is and wants the system to trace it. He might still let the system trace his preferences even if he explicitly specified what his learning style is. If tracing is desired the value of personal.traceTextvsImage is set to true. During the actual interaction of the learner with the system, the user’s repetitive accesses to textual representations increase the confidence of the system that the user is a verbalizer, indicated by the expression “personal.VERBvsIM+5”. Correspondingly repetitive accesses to pictorial representations increase the confidence of the system that the user is an imager, indicated by “personal.VERBvsIM-5”.The system will trace the user’s behavior until the value of the “VERBvsIM” attribute reaches a meaningful threshold (30 or 70), then the value of the attribute personal.traceTextvsImage will be set to false and tracing will stop. Afterwards an instructional strategy corresponding to the new value of the “VERBvsIM” will be suggested to the user.