Revisiting the intelligent book: Towards seamless intelligent content and continuously deployed courses

Abstract

In the early 2000s, colleagues and I developed The Intelligent Book – a suite of technologies for adaptive materials, that let students work with smart graphical exercises as if the AI was their partner rather than their marker. We envisaged a future where online content would be brimming with interactive models, lettings students explore and tinker with problems alongside AI that would guide students in their thinking. The browsers of the day were technically limited, but since then, the technological landscape of the web has transformed. Meanwhile, online education (especially during the Covid-19 pandemic) has grown the need for interactive materials that “understand what they teach” and can make explanations explorable and “proddable”. In online education, physical group activities (e.g., programming robots) are not available to us, and we see a growing need for digital experiences and models to replace the responsiveness that comes from tangible interaction with a device or experiment. Over the last two years, I have begun revisiting the ideas of the Intelligent Book for the modern technology landscape. This paper gives an early overview of the project, working once again towards infrastructure for self-publishable courses that can be full to overflowing with proddable and explorable models.