the Ruler - Rule question

Thanks Al,
Excellent info.

This raises an interesting question for us.

If we did have a ruler for complexity of language (one that everyone
agreed with)

Would we

a) Put in a rule that says "go as far down that ruler as you can"?

or

b) Draw a line on the ruler and say "you must get below that line but
don’t need to go lower -- though it would be good if you did"?

option (c) --   "you must have content that works for all on the rule"
doesn’t work since the rules must go down to 0 to include all.

a) takes us back to the problem of 'no clear criterion'
b) is what is usually done -  but is very hard to do without a consensus
rulemaking body.

What are people thinking?

A?  or B?  or C?  or ??

Gregg
-- ------------------------------
Gregg C Vanderheiden Ph.D.
Professor - Human Factors
Dept of Ind. Engr. - U of Wis.
Director - Trace R & D Center
Gv@trace.wisc.edu <mailto:Gv@trace.wisc.edu>, <http://trace.wisc.edu/>
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-----CLIP FROM Original Message-----


The idea of grade level as a metric with benefits for accomplishing
accomodation of congnitive differences is quite real.  We will likely
rathole
if we try to solve this ourselves but fortunately we don't necessarily
have to
take that on.

There are professionals pursuing this as we speak.  This is an area
where W3C
and the WAI should be prepared to mostly 'follow,' as in "lead, follow,
or get
out of the way."  At least one education targeted activity we can look
for
leadership from in defining a "cognitive challenge level, comparable to
what
has been called grade level in the past" is the IMS Project.  We are not
competitive with that group in taking on this particular piece of work.
Jutta
and Gregory are working with them on their access metadata schema or
vocabulary.  Good to check if there is grade level stuff that can be
borrowed
from IMS in general, or if the access metadata effort has to get that on
the
agenda.

Compare this approach, where there are alternative sites differing in
grade
level all provided by one authoring activity, with Kynn's concept that
keywords
(metadata) be used as the means to relate material at one grade level
from one
source with material at a different grade level from another source.  In
this
case a search or catalog lookup process does the two-dimensional
analysis of
"same topic, better level" to find resources that the user is likely to
find
desirable.

There is a third approach where one passes a grade level parameter to a
Reef
style view synthesis processor and for example there are explicit
hyperlinks to
explanatory resources attached to tough words and sentences for an
adapted,
appropriate definition of 'tough.'  There are inline ways like this to
accomplish grade level accomodation, but they tend to involve setting
thresholds that govern when one technique is applied vs. another
(explicit
glossary link vs. leave it to Atomica).  And they have limited ranges
over
which they can accomodate, at the limits of which one has to flop over
the
phase boundary into a qualitatively different strategy.

Al

Received on Sunday, 29 July 2001 12:24:24 UTC