Applying Common Sense to Distance Learning: the Case of Home Care Education Junia Coutinho Anacleto 1 , Aparecido Fabiano Pinatti de Carvalho 1 , Vânia Paula de Almeida Néris 1 , Muriel de Souza Godoi 1 , Silvia Zem-Mascarenhas 1 , Américo Talarico Neto, Henry Lieberman 2 1 Advanced Interaction Laboratory – LIA Computer Department – Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar) Rod. Washigton Luis KM 235 – São Carlos – SP – Brazil {junia,fabiano,vania,muriel_godoi,americo}@dc.ufscar.br, silviazem@power.ufscar.br 2 MIT Media Laboratory 20 Ames St., 384A - Cambridge - MA – 02139 lieber@media.mit.edu ABSTRACT One of the challenges of Distance Learning (DL) over the Web is that it imposes physical distance between teachers and students, and thus reduces opportunities for teachers to fully understand the state of student knowledge and adapt instructional material to their needs. While the knowledge to be taught is usually well expressed in the curriculum material, the knowledge of a typical student is harder to codify. In this paper, it is shown how a large knowledge base of common sense statements can be used to help model student knowledge and consequently to help teachers plan learning actions by • Identifying topics that need coverage by the curriculum; • Identifying what a student is already likely to know; • Locating possible misconceptions that need to be corrected; and • Assuring that the student understands the vocabulary needed to express relevant subject material. Categories and Subject Descriptors K.3.1 COMPUTER USES IN EDUCATION; J.3 LIFE AND MEDICAL SCIENCES; H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION General Terms Design, Experimentation, Human Factors, Languages, Theory Keywords Brazilian Open Mind Common Sense, health care, home care, learning action, computer-aid education. 1. INTRODUCTION Many projects in curriculum development for distance learning or Intelligent Tutoring Systems have good models of the knowledge that is to be taught; few have very good models of what the student knows. Usually, the student knowledge is modeled as a subset of the knowledge that an expert is supposed to have. But that knowledge is usually confined to a narrow area in the subject domain; and there has been no good way to model a student's knowledge of "life in general", which of course is brought to bear by the student in any attempt to understand specific subject matter. The power of common sense knowledge is that it serves as a generic model of what an ordinary person could be expected to know. Teaching can then be viewed as an activity that explains the expert knowledge by relating it to general knowledge. Often, good ways to do that are by making analogies from the expert knowledge to everyday life, or teaching by example, where the examples are chosen so that the student can relate to them. This idea has been already explored in an on-line help assistant that automatically searches for such analogies and examples [2]. Here, it is considered that common sense can be used as a student knowledge model to guide a curriculum designer. In this context, common sense can be defined as the knowledge that is shared by the vast majority of people who live in a particular culture [1], [7]. For example, simple statements such as “ice is cold”, knowledge about the world as “Brazil is in Latin America” and (possibly controversial) beliefs as “North Americans are the best soccer players in the world” are included. When it is said that some statement is common sense in a culture, it doesn’t mean that it is scientifically true or even that it is also common sense in other cultures. For example the statement “North Americans are the best soccer players in the world” might be considered common sense in USA, but it is not possible to say that the same statement can be considered common sense in Argentina. According to the common sense definition presented before, which considers as common sense the knowledge that most people agree with in a certain community at a certain period of time, the number of people in a culture who agree with the same statement is what defines whether the statement is common sense Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Conference’04, Month 1–2, 2004, City, State, Country. Copyright 2004 ACM 1-58113-000-0/00/0004…$5.00.