As the theme of the 8th world conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education, held in Kobe Japan, was ‘Knowledge and Media in Learning Systems’ I shouldn’t have been as surprised as I was that the current interests of the AI & ED community now closely match that of KMi’s. The bulk of papers discussed the emerging roles of intelligent multimedia and distributed technologies as well as computer supported collaboration. There were workshops on Intelligent Educational Systems on the World-Wide Web and on Collaborative Learning/Working Support Systems with Networking. Also number of papers described use of animated pedagogical agents within learning environments.
Most surprising was the fact that ontologies, a framework originating from the knowledge modelling community for enabling knowledge to be shared, are playing a significant role within the AI & ED community. Riichiro Mizoguchi, the local conference chair, is constructing a task ontology to enable intelligent educational systems to share knowledge and to be reuseable. This work is being carried out within an IEEE project. In his presentation on Distributed Intelligent Tutoring on the Web Peter Brusilovsky described his long term goal of having user model servers which would be used by multiple web based intelligent educational systems sharing a common ontology.
If you want to find out more details on the conference I have the proceedings in my office.