Development and evaluation of a mediabase system for supporting inductive knowledge acquisition

Abstract

AbstractWith the progress of computer applications to education, such facilities as databases and hypermedia have come into educational use in recent years. The mediabase system “ShareMedia” which is being developed in this study is a system that supports the description, sharing, retrieval, and examination of knowledge by students. In ShareMedia, a semantic frame is used by a community of students by common agreement. A rough semantic index is added to the media representation, so that the same community or the inheriting community can extract closely related media representations through such an index or its converted form and can use it for comparison and examination. It is intended in this study to support the inductive acquisition of generalized knowledge which applies to the domain under consideration, that is, Japanese geography and world geography as subjects in junior high school. A system was experimentally constructed and a preliminary experiment performed. The results suggested that the support of knowledge acquisition by ShareMedia browsing is useful in aiding the student to discover general knowledge and the rules in a domain with which the student is not familiar. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Comp Jpn, 34(8): 100–111, 2003; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/scj.1212