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    1. Retargetable Course Generation

    Issues in Authoring Adaptive Hypertext

    Adaptive or Flexible Hypertext, which presents different hypertext nodes or navigations to the user has been studied extensively from the reader perspective. Often, this is done with mechanisms that gather information about users and their history navigating the document.

    Retargeting is our term for targeting and reusing hypertext (e.g., web course) information for different audiences, e.g., when the same course is taught to undergraduates and to graduate students.

    Tools for authoring such hypertext depend upon the characteristics of the author in the same sense that presenting the material depends upon characteristics of the reader.

    We have studied these via ReCourse, the Retargetable Course Generation System. (See Projects and Publications) an currently with OfCourse! a new generation system incorporating some of our results.

    2. Designing, Implementing and Teaching Programming Languages on the Web

    Distance Education

    All learning is essentially self-learning, whether with an instructor or not. People, especially students, often use the web to learn.

    Motivated by the Teach Yourself natural language series, and using the experience from years of teaching students and the more recent experience of teaching distance learning courses (See teaching), I have designed a series of programming languages and created a site where novice programmers can study the programming process. In addition, I study how people teach themselves languages and programming.

    RoBOTL is an introductory object-oriented language whose syntax is based on C++ and whose semantics is based on Richard Pattis's Karel, the Robot.

    RoBOTL is fully functional, with tutorials that are light-hearted and fun. RoBOTL has been been tested (with Frontiers students for four years).

    For those with some programming experience, we designed: JavaBOTL to ease the student into programming in Java.

    A more gentle introduction to Java is provided by Tea.