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Anais do IHC'2001 - Departamento de Informática e Estatística - UFSC

Anais do IHC'2001 - Departamento de Informática e Estatística - UFSC

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<strong>Anais</strong> <strong>do</strong> IHC’2001 - IV Workshop sobre Fatores Humanos em Sistemas Computacionais 239<br />

themselves be produced in iconic or in<strong>de</strong>xical form as well as in symbolic form. This<br />

condition is apparently necessary to ensure a continuum from DCM into RDCM interaction.<br />

2. What elements of the representation of a concept should be allowed to be manipulated<br />

—i.e., what controls (or handles) to manipulate, how to embed these controls in the<br />

visual structure, and in what or<strong>de</strong>r, if necessary, [should] they be manipulated?<br />

Visual co<strong>de</strong>s inclu<strong>de</strong> static and dynamic forms. Static forms are visualizations; dynamic<br />

forms are manipulations. So, a concept must not necessarily be represented by static forms<br />

alone ⎯ it can be represented by a manipulation of visual forms. The <strong>de</strong>cision on how to<br />

express the possibility of manipulation (typically by the use of a handle) is secondary to the<br />

<strong>de</strong>cision of which kind of manipulation pattern to use. An a<strong>de</strong>quate integration (or<br />

embedding) of signs of interactive possibilities into signs of <strong>do</strong>main concepts may not be<br />

an easy task.<br />

For instance, if learners are expected to acquire the appropriate grammatical knowledge for<br />

producing embed<strong>de</strong>d sentences with the pronoun whose in English, the use of DCM and<br />

RDCM interfaces is a major <strong>de</strong>sign challenge. Although advanced grammatical studies in<br />

Linguistics eventually lead learners to represent syntactic structures by means of trees or<br />

graphs, at the time this knowledge is taught to stu<strong>de</strong>nts the use of trees and graphs is<br />

excessively abstract. The alternative teaching aid is often one of resorting to metaphors,<br />

like bounding boxes around phrases, arrows directing the movement of syntactic<br />

constituents, and colored overwriting to indicate pronominal substitutions (see Figure 7).<br />

Figure 7: Visualizing embeddings of wh- clauses in english<br />

Thus, when building a DCM-RDCM interface for teaching a subject matter like this, a<br />

<strong>de</strong>signer should select some metaphoric expressions for the <strong>do</strong>main concepts and iteratively<br />

seek for an a<strong>de</strong>quate means to express interactive patterns that can be used with them. The<br />

cost of metaphoric expressions is a bigger cognitive effort required from learners, who will<br />

have to bridge the gap from metaphoric to abstract concept formulation without the help of<br />

the system. In the example above, learners should go from moving boxes and replacing<br />

constituents with pronouns to acquiring general extraposition and pronominalization<br />

principles for embedding wh- clauses into main sentences. Likewise, the or<strong>de</strong>r of<br />

manipulation should follow a path from narrower to wi<strong>de</strong>r gaps, supporting learners in the<br />

process of gaining increasing competence in producing abstract discourse about the general<br />

principles of the <strong>do</strong>main. In this respect, Lakoff’s theory of metaphor and cognitive<br />

ontology should be a resourceful instrument for supporting <strong>de</strong>sign <strong>de</strong>cisions.<br />

3. What type of mouse interaction protocol [should we] implement to direct learners<br />

attention towards the essential aspects of a concept?<br />

A semiotic revision of DCM and RDCM styles of interface for learnware seems to indicate<br />

that this issue cannot be treated in<strong>de</strong>pen<strong>de</strong>ntly of the former. In fact, mouse interaction<br />

protocols are part of the dynamic signs that will constitute the representation of concepts.

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