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Gerry Stahl’s assembled texts volume #8 Essays in Personalizable Software Gerry Stahl Essays in Personalizable Software 2 Gerry Stahl's Assembled Texts 1. Marx and Heidegger 2. Tacit and Explicit Understanding in Computer Support 3. Group Cognition: Computer Support for Building Collaborative Knowledge 4. Studying Virtual Math Teams 5. Translating Euclid: Designing a Human-Centered Mathematics. 6. Constructing Dynamic Triangles Together: The Development of Mathematical Group Cognition 7. Essays in Social Philosophy 8. Essays in Personalizable Software 9. Essays in Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning 10. Essays in Group-Cognitive Science 11. Essays in PHilosopHy of Group Cognition 12. Essays in Online MatHematics Interaction 13. Essays in Collaborative Dynamic Geometry 14. Adventures in Dynamic Geometry 15. Global Introduction to CSCL 16. Editorial Introductions to ijCSCL 17. Proposals for ResearcH 18. Overview and Autobiographical Essays 19. Theoretical Investigations 20. Works of 3-D Form 21. Dynamic Geometry Game for Pods Essays in Personalizable Software 3 Gerry Stahl’s assembled texts volume #8 Essays in Personalizable Software Gerry Stahl Essays in Personalizable Software 4 Gerry Stahl [email protected] www.GerryStahl.net Copyright © 2011, 2021 by Gerry Stahl Published by Gerry Stahl at Lulu.com Printed in the USA ISBN: 978-1-329-85913-5 (ebook) ISBN 978-1-329-85917-3 (paperback) Essays in Personalizable Software 5 Introduction uch of my work in computer science at the University of Colorado in Boulder can be characterized as explorations of personalizable software. For M me, that term increasingly meant designing hypermedia systems that would allow people to explore information from different personal perspectives. This theme persisted in my research from the time that I joined Gerhard Fischer’s lab as a beginning graduate student in 1989 and became a research assistant for Ray McCall in 1990 until I transitioned into educational software upon graduation in 1993. The switch to educational software stretched across many years and several roles, including software developer, post-doc and research professor. The development of WebGuide played a central role in the transition, since WebGuide applied the mechanisms of personalizable software and computational perspectives to an educational application. While the highlights of this work are presented in Group Cognition (Stahl, 2006), a number of writings that did not make it into that volume fill in important aspects of my explorations of personalizable software. The present volume has been assembled to make those essays available in an organized way. This book is structured in four sections, corresponding roughly to phases in the development of my research on personalizable software: 1. As a research assistant for Ray McCall, I rewrote his Phidias software system for design rationale capture. This became my dissertation Hermes system with perspectives. The concept behind these systems was to provide a multimedia hypertext system, including an English-like query language for browsing design rationale and associated artifacts or information. I added the idea of allowing different people to personalize their access to this structured hypermedia from their own perspectives, as defined by the query language. This became the basis for my doctoral dissertation (Stahl, 2010b). 2. Following the completion of my dissertation work on Hermes, I developed several other personalizable software systems, such as WebGuide. In a series of technical reports, I considered the nature of personalizable software, using these prototypes as “objects to think with.” 3. WebGuide was designed in collaboration with Thomas Herrmann and his assistants. The goal was to combine my perspectives mechanisms with his negotiation-support mechanisms. This goal was never realized until considerably later after I left Colorado and worked on the BSCL system (see Chapters 7 and 8 of Group Cognition). However, during this period I developed the perspectives mechanism further. Essays in Personalizable Software 6 4. In later years, I often returned to the concept of personalizable software, exploring its potential in a variety of application areas. I worked with other people to investigate potentials and issues involved in applying personalization mechanisms to their domains. Part I. Structured Hypermedia The first essay presents the structured hypermedia system of Phidias, with its end- user query language (Stahl, 1991; Stahl, McCall & Peper, 1992). It situates this system within the field of artificial intelligence by comparing it with rule-based expert systems, which were all the rage at the time. This research was under a Colorado Advanced Software Institute (CASI) state grant to Ray McCall in the College of Environmental design in collaboration with Geri Peper at IBM’s Boulder research lab. I published it as Technical Report in the Computer Science department in November 1991 and revised it in August 1992. Peper presented it at an IBM conference in October 1992. The next essay grew out of work under a second CASI grant, this time in collaboration with Johnson Engineering, a local NASA subcontractor (Stahl, 1992a). In this grant, we adapted our structured hypermedia system to support design of lunar habitats. As preliminary work on my dissertation, I reviewed theories of design and approaches of artificial intelligence as related to our system. I also began to develop a conceptualization of alternative personal perspectives as views on the design knowledge captured in the hypermedia. This research culminated in my doctoral dissertation proposal (Stahl, 1992b). I proposed the Hermes system, which built on ideas from McCall’s Phidias system and from the work on Janus by a number of dissertation projects in Fischer’s lab on domain-oriented design environments (DOdEs). This, of course, led to my computer science dissertation (Stahl, 1993; 2010b). The Hermes system defined an underlying structured hypermedia system that could support all the components of a dOdE as different views of the hypermedia information. A hierarchy of perspectives could also be defined, further structuring and personalizing these views. The personalization was controlled through an end-user definable query language. Part II. Personalizable Software After graduation, I became the director of Software development at Owen Research, a small research firm conducting SBIR grants. There, I developed a prototype Teacher’s Curriculum Assistant (TCA) (Stahl, Sumner & Owen, 1995). I also prototyped an application of perspectives to a system for corporate usage, the Collaborative Information Environment (CIE), working with another software start-up. These experiences led me to expound a theory of personalizable software (Stahl, 1995). The major statement of this theory discussed the examples of Essays in Personalizable Software 7 TCA, the Agentsheets Remote Exploratorium (ARE) and a proposed Personalizable Learning Medium (PLM). This paper has never been published before. It is the conceptual centerpiece of this volume. When I returned to the University of Colorado as a post-doc, I presented the idea of personalizable software, now applied to the World Wide Web, which was becoming popular with the availability of browsers (Stahl, 1996). Here, I discussed Hermes, TCA, PLM, and CIE. In addition, I included WebNet, a system that I was developing with colleagues in Fischer’s lab. Hermes, TCA and WebNet are discussed separately in Group Cognition, chapters 4, 1 and 5, respectively. This section closes with a summary of the approach to personalizing software (Stahl, 1999c). It presents WebNet, TCA and CIE as three models incorporating mechanisms from Hermes. Part IIII. Software Perspectives The first paper in this section situates my perspectives mechanism from Hermes in the context of critiquing systems within the dOdEs of Fischer’s lab (Fischer et al., 1993a). Co-authored with the people who wrote dissertations with me in that lab, this paper was the first that I presented at an international conference. The perspectives mechanism was here introduced in terms of a third form of critic, an interpretive critic, in addition to generic and specific critics. The next paper expanded the conference paper into a journal-length presentation, published in the Knowledge Engineering Review (Fischer et al., 1993b) and later reprinted in Readings in Intelligent User Interfaces (Fischer et al., 1998). This provides an overview of the theory of dOdEs including the latest examples, approaches and mechanisms. In 1999, I gave a number of conference presentations (Stahl, 1999a). They particularly emphasized the potential of personalization techniques for Web applications. Earlier DODEs had been heavyweight desktop applications, most of them requiring special Symbolics LISP machines to run the prototypes. The Web provided a venue for lightweight applications that could be deployed to users relatively easily. It seemed ideal for supporting collaboration. The WebNet system for network administrators (see Group Cognition chapter 5) was a first exploration of this while I was a post-doc working with Jonathan Ostwald and Gerhard Fischer. As a Research Professor, I began work on WebGuide for students (see Group Cognition chapter 6), and that was the prime example in this paper. The next paper presented more detail on the implications of the WebGuide system in my CSCL 1999 presentation (Stahl, 1999b). It illustrated a number of issues for personalizable, Web-based systems,
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