Towards supporting the teaching of history using an intelligent information system that relies on the electronic road metaphor

Abstract

The new educational system in Greece, as far as teaching of history is concerned, is characterized by a shift away from sterile memorization and towards a critical approach of historical facts and phenomena that would contribute in both the development of pupils' historical concept and conscience and the promotion of critical thought. This reflects the globally accepted goals of teaching history courses. Such teaching goals can be greatly supported by computer-based applications, which can offer access to vast amounts of historical texts and data to be used next to the main scholar textbook and be analyzed by pupils. Still, existing applications seem to be quite inadequate for this purpose, as they require that the pupil be already informed on a matter, before the initiation of a quest for data. We describe an intelligent information system that is designed to facilitate browsing of educational material and historical sources, thus allowing pupils to efficiently retrieve information on topics that are not yet known to them and expand in this way their historical knowledge. This can help in fulfilling the teaching goals of the new educational system.