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Five
years ago, as part of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence's
(AAAI) Fall Symposium Seriers, the symposium, "Improving the Instruction
of Indtroductory AI" was held. Barbara Grosz, then president of AAAI
concluded the symposium by accepting the following two action items for
the association (see SIGART Bulletin, 6, 2, April 1995):
1. Have available at the AAAI Web site a central repository of programs,
tools, assignments, and papers, and
2. Organize tutorials to be given at AAAI's national conferences and the
International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) on
how to teach the more specialized protions of the introductory AI course,
such as vision, NLP, and robotics.
Five years have passed since that symposium and it is almost time for
AAAI to host another one. In this installment, I would like to discuss
the AAAI Educational Repository mentioned in Action Item 1 above.
The repository, is a centralized distribution point that (1) focuses on
Web educational resources and materials to be used in undergraduate AI
pedagogy, (2) identifies and organizes such resources by topic, and (3)
provides diverse resources applicable to various levels of student expertise
and budgetary considerations. The repository includes information on current
AI textbooks, links to syllabii, sample programming and written assignments,
on-line tutorials, information on tools and environments that may be used
in the classroom, and papers on AI pedagogy, etc. Also included are mechanisms
for submitting your own AI education resources. The repository can be
accessed at http://www.aaai.org by clicking on the link, AI
Resources and, under the heading, "Source Information," clicking on the link AAAI Education Repository. The repository
is currently maintained by Bill Manaris of the University of SW Louisisna.
At the aforementioned symposium, Pat Hayes and Ken Ford had issued a challenge
for the creation of a WWW-based "textbook". The tchapters in
the textbook would cover specific topics, each an up-to-date survey of
a subarea of AI, written by people with thorough knowledge of that area.
The idea was to have such a text continuously revised and expanded to
adapt to changes in AI. This multi-author text would exist as distributed
content managed by sufficient editorial control and commentary to ensure
common vocabulary and style. While I am uncertain about the progress on
the challenge, I would like to have you consider using the educational
repository as a possible infrastructure for the creation of such a text.
Use it to obtain materials for which you may not have expertise, and contribute
educational materials for the topics in which you do have expertise.
As for organizing tutorials on teaching of specific topics (Action Item
2), I think AAAI and IJCAI could do a better job. Although some tutorial-like
sessions have been held at these conferences, most focus on informing
AI researchers and practitioners rather than educators. I believe that
AAAI, and its membership, ought to extend beyond AAAI, IJCAI and other
topic-specific AI conferences to offer tutorials. Teaching of AI is largely
carried out by computer science faculty who may not be directly involved
in doing AI research. Possibly the best place to hold tutrorials is at
the annual meetings of ACM's Special Interest Group on Computer Science
Education(SIGCSE). SIGCSE meetings have a rich tradition of offering educators
workshops on the teaching of new methodologies, technologies, and ideas
emerging in computer science. More than half the attendees at the SIGCSE
annual meetings enroll in these workshops. For more information on ACM
SIGCSE and its Workshop Program for educators, check out their WWW page
at: http://www.acm.org/sigcse.
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