Authoring Tools

This session was a great way to kick off the conference proper! Every presentation gave me lots to consider, and there was a broad range of topics from the evergreen to the very much in vogue.

A New View

Seeing that hypertext development software tooling is not a solved science in any way and there are still radical new developments was an exciting way to start off the conference. I have not used Tinderbox so I don’t know how this alternate view works in practice, but would be curious to see if it goes anywhere. This presentation gave me the interesting takeaway that, in research as in life, we should never get complacent and just accept “good enough”.

Beyond The Page-Break

This gave me a lot to consider, but felt sort of like stepping foot into an active warzone. I get the impression this is not a new topic of discussion.

Experiencing The Authorial Burden

What an interesting study on struggles in authorship and ways in which people try to alleviate them! It feels like an early exploration of an idea, but I think this will turn into some very interesting research over time.

Authoring Educational Hypercomics assisted by Large Language Models

I must be honest, I did not have a particularly high opinion of this. The assistive LLM tooling is interesting conceptually but the output comics seemed trite, there was no consideration for the structure of the output (longer hypercomics would balloon in size as every single choice creates a new branch, a basic scaling issue that Mark Bernstein observed 30 years ago), and there was no consideration for the actual conceit here (the usage of these generated comics in education purposes).

Personally, I think that educational tools should not just be treated like an afterthought or a playground to test new technologies in. Education and training for children and adults is important and underexplored. It’s legitimately frustrating to not even consider this technology in the practical context it is supposed to be for - that educators would have a functional purpose for these comics, and actual people would then engage with them for training. For children this creates a danger of failing to engage them in the subject, and for adults this could be legitimately dangerous (would this be efficable in teaching health and safety, for example?)

I have been a child bouncing off of educational tools because of their poor delivery, I’ve been an adult working on the development of training tools and feeling some frustrations over a lack of considerations that real people will use them, and my girlfriend works in learning development & training for adult workers. I feel strongly about this, and one of my key questions from the conference is what to do when a presentation leaves me feeling like this. It is obviously not through any ill intent on the part of the researchers and I’m sure the work is technically competent at what they wanted it to do, but it’s certainly given me much to consider.