KARMA: The Knowledge Acquisition Reference Multimedia Aid
Jay Liebowitz, Christine Letsky · The journal · 1996
According to The Chronicle of Higher Education,[1] only about 4% of those surveyed use multimedia and CD-ROM materials in the classroom. This is a surprisingly low percentage, especially with the rapidly growing interest in multimedia use in education and business. Part of the reason for this lack of use is an unwillingness of some faculty to inject this new technology into classroom or supplemental material outside of class. Some faculty suggest that multimedia is all hype and no content. Granted that multimedia is now being touted as the current fad and multimedia educational material has a long way to go, a number of successful projects incorporating learning theories into educational multimedia software are being developed and used, such as those at the Institute for Learning Sciences at Northwestern University.[2] Even without explicit incorporation of these learning theories, multimedia could be very stimulating for students and faculty. The College of Integrated Science and Technology (CISAT) at James Madison University is developing multimedia software, as part of its charter, for helping students learn various strategic sectors and underlying concepts. One of the strategic sciences emphasized at CISAT is management, of which expert and knowledge-based systems play a critical role. The first multimedia software developed for CISAT and for its knowledge management discipline was a CD-ROM called Developing Your First Expert System. It is now being used in over 25 countries, distributed by the non-profit organization, International Society for Intelligent Systems (ISIS).[3] This CD has been used at james Madison University, George Washington University, the US Army War College and over 60 institutions and organizations. The thrust of this multimedia aid is to step the student through the knowledge life cycle (i.e., the expert system development process). Due to the success of this CD project, another multimedia program was constructed in the knowledge management area to help students learn knowledge acquisition techniques. A previous hypermedia version (mainly hypertext) of this program, called KARTT (Knowledge Acquisition Research and Teaching Tool), was developed by Liebowitz and Bland.[4] KARTT lacked some pleasing user interface designs, so KARMA was constructed to address some of these deficiencies. KARMA has been developed using Authorware Professional and includes lessons, models, acquisition sessions and exercises on knowledge acquisition. The first version has just been completed (December 1995) after four months of development. It will be used in the knowledge acquisition component of the Analytical Methods course at james Madison University and the Military Applications of Artificial Intelligence course at the US Army War College in the spring 1996 semester. * Knowledge Acquisition Knowledge acquisition is the process of acquiring knowledge from an expert or multiple experts for developing the knowledge base of the expert system. Knowledge acquisition is still the biggest bottleneck in expert systems development due to a number of reasons. First, it is fairly labor-and time-intensive to interview the expert(s) and handcraft this acquired knowledge into a knowledge base. Second, many knowledge engineers may not be well-skilled and experienced in interviewing or using other knowledge acquisition techniques (like learning by analogy, observation, protocol analysis, etc.), thereby making the knowledge acquisition (and knowledge representation) process an arduous task. Third, the engineering paradox says that the more expert an individual, the more compiled the knowledge and the harder it is to extract. Thus, the knowledge acquisition process is a difficult one, especially exposing the rules of thumb (i.e., heuristics) that the expert has compiled over many years of experience. The process of knowledge acquisition transcends the mere expert system project development. …