The Washington Post has recently drawn our attention to the release of a report to Congress by the US Department of Education, which --­shortly said--demonstrates that educational software have no significant impact on student performance. This is a good news, to some extend, since it seems that in general no one can demonstrate whatever in our domain...
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Lorsque je cherche un article ou un livre pour les besoins de mon travail, me rendre dans une bibliothèque n'est plus la seule solution. Je trouve une grande part de la documentation dont j'ai besoin grâce aux abonnements électroniques auxquels mon laboratoire souscrit, et—de façon plus incertaine mais souvent surprenante—grâce à ...
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About 10 years ago, John Self wrote "If a field is to call itself ‘AI in Education’, then it seems necessary for it to say what it considers ‘education’ to be. However, despite its name, AI-ED has never been concerned with education in its broad sense but only with the specific issue of learning." Reading again the introduction of his essay on "Computational mathetics", I thought that this is an issue worth to consider again as we are about to consider our metadata from an international perspective.
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We have all experienced difficulties in translating our papers and talks into English, and some of our English colleagues have taken up the same challenge when preparing their communication in an other language. The difficulty is classical: translation is not a mere transduction, words from two different languages rarely match. Interestingly, this problem imposes itself with the more important word on our domain: Learning...
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What do you think are the main challenges for the European Commissions TEL (technology-enhanced learning) research policy, and how do you see Kaleidoscope’s role in this context?" Asked me Beate Kleessen.
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The word “Research” evokes the fascination of knowledge as well as the expectation of the mastery of the unknown. Research outcomes are expected to be innovative by nature and reliable by construction. Everything works as if being based on research, actions and decisions should be less risky than being based on any other grounds; namely, opinions and beliefs. Indeed, “opinion” is an intellectual category hazardous and anything but reliable, while “belief” is as contingent as opinion with the worse characteristic that facing failures it does not leave room for much revision.

The strength of research results lies in their justification, ruled argumentation (proof) or systematic empirical evidence, and their accessibility to revision under the pressure of refutation. Research results have the epistemic characteristic of knowledge; they are products of a human activity which transcend the historical and anecdotical context marking their origin. However, from a scientific perspective, a piece of knowledge is not a statement, but the complex “object” shaped by the relations between a statement, a proof and a theory—all framed by an accepted problématique that informs about the relevance of a question. The return of investment in research is the reliability, universality and openness of its outcomes, its cost is theory, proofs and dealing with refutations. This has two meanings: (i) research is not about the so called “reality”, but phenomena identified through the lenses of a problématique; (ii) the dialectic of proofs and refutation is not empirical but of a theoretical nature, possibly addressing not a result but its rationale or even its underlying problématique.

Nothing new there, but something to bring back to the fore when we question the role and the contribution of research to the development of TEL. Something which has been forgotten (or lost) with the emergence of “acadustry”!