Living Book – Deduction, Slicing, and Interaction

Living Book is a system for the management of personalized and scenario-specific teaching material. The main goal of the system is to support active, explorative, and self-determined learning in lectures, tutorials, and self-study. Living Book includes a course on “logic for computer scientists,” with uniform access to various tools such as theorem provers and an interactive tableau editor. It is routinely used in teaching undergraduate courses at our university. This paper describes Living Book, together with its use of theorem-proving technology as a core component in the knowledge management system (KMS) and the use of this new concept in academic teaching. The KMS provides a scenario management component in which teachers may describe those parts of given documents that are relevant in order to achieve a certain learning goal. The task of the KMS is to assemble new documents from a database of elementary units called “slices” (definitions, theorems, and so on) in a scenario-based way (such as, “I want to prepare for an exam and need to learn about resolution”). The computation of such assemblies is carried out by a model-generating theorem prover for first-order logic with a default negation principle. Its input consists of metadata that describes the dependencies between different slices and logic-programming style rules that describe the scenario-specific composition of slices. Additionally, users may assess what units they know or don't know. This information is stored in a user model, which is taken into account to compute a model that specifies the assembly of a personalized document. This paper introduces the e-learning context we are faced with, motivates our choice of logic, and sketches the newly developed calculus used in the KMS. Furthermore, the application and evaluation of Living Book are presented.