An Active Object-Based Digital Library for Microeconomics Education

来自不同学科的学生学习微观经济学课程，以了解各种类型的市场是如何运作的，以及企业和消费者如何在这些市场做出买卖决策。因此，微观经济学教育在培养未来的商业领袖和从业者方面发挥着重要作用，并作为其他领域学生一般商业和社会科学培训的一部分。目前，微观经济学课程通常采用传统的授课形式。然而，经济理论和电子商务的最新发展要求在课程内容设计和交付方面进行重大创新。一个新兴的趋势是允许学生通过各种市场机构积极参与经济决策，包括最近新兴的基于互联网的在线市场机构，以获得实践经验和经济洞察力。建构主义学习理论支持这种教育方式。它承诺将在新的千年里彻底改变微观经济学课程的教学方式。虽然已经开始了几项努力，以创建包括实验工具和软件在内的在线微观经济学内容，但这些内容是在封闭的系统开发和内容收集范例中开发的，因此无法扩大规模。在这个项目中，我们正在创建一个基于数字图书馆(DL)的开放方法，以应对开发可扩展和可扩展的微观经济学相关内容集合的挑战。(A)从应用领域，即微观经济学的角度来看，我们正在为创造新类型的数字内容作出贡献，包括模拟的信息技术强化的市场机构和作为软件代理实施的智能交易系统。这些代理人正在成为信息技术强化的电子市场机构的一部分，这些机构有可能极大地降低经济交易成本和提高经济决策的质量。(B)从国家STEM数字图书馆的角度来看，我们正在创建一个符合开放档案倡议(OAI)的微观经济学教育内容集合，其中包括实验软件和自动化电子商务代理。我们正在进行的一项主要的数字图书馆研究任务是开发活动对象的元数据表示，例如软件模块(例如，经济学实验软件)。这项研究有可能应用于其他涉及软件和模拟环境的DL集合。(C)从教育的角度来看，我们正在利用开发的积极的基于对象的数字图书馆来开发新的综合微观经济学课程。我们正在研究这些新课程的影响，并研究课程管理和教学方法的相关变化。我们正在结合亚利桑那大学几个学术部门和实验室的研究、教学和评估专业知识和资源。四个主要实体是：(1)经济科学实验室，一个主要的实验经济学方法和应用机构；(2)人工智能实验室，一个领先的数字图书馆、互联网计算和软件代理机构；(3)霍夫曼电子商务实验室，一个专注于电子商务教学和研究的教学和研究机构；以及(4)大学学院教学创新中心，一个强调信息技术对教育影响的教学评估机构。

Students from a variety of disciplines take Microeconomics courses to learn how various types of markets function and how enterprises and consumers make buying and selling decisions in these markets. As such, Microeconomics education plays an important role in preparing future business leaders and practitioners and serves as part of general business and social sciences training for students in other fields of study. Currently, Microeconomics courses are typically taught in a traditional lecture format. Recent developments in economic theory and electronic commerce, however, call for significant innovations in course content design and delivery. An emerging trend is to allow the students to actively participate in economic decision-making through various market institutions, including recently emerging Internet-based online market institutions, to gain hands-on experience and acquire economic insights. Constructivist learning theory supports this educational approach. It promises to revolutionize the way in which Microeconomics courses will be taught in this new Millennium. Although several efforts have been initiated to create online Microeconomics contents, including experimentation tools and software, they have been developed in a system development and content collection paradigm that is closed and therefore cannot scale. In this project we are creating a Digital Library (DL)-based, open approach to deal with the challenges of developing an extensible and scalable collection of Microeconomics related contents. (a) From the perspective of the application domain, i.e., Microeconomics, we are making contributions in creating new types of digital contents, including simulated IT-enhanced market institutions and intelligent trading systems implemented as software agents. These agents are emerging as part of the IT-enhanced electronic market institutions that have the potential of greatly reducing economic transaction costs and improving the quality of economic decision-making. (b) From the viewpoint of the National STEM Digital Library, we are creating an Open Archives Initiative (OAI)-compliant collection of Microeconomics education contents that incorporates experimental software and automated e-commerce agents. A major DL research task that we are undertaking is the development of a metadata representation of active objects such as software modules (e.g., economics experimental software). This research has the potential of being applied in other DL collections involving software and simulation environments. (c) From the educational viewpoint, we are developing new integrated Microeconomics curricula leveraging the developed active objected-based DL. We are studying the impact of these new curricula, and investigating related changes in course management and teaching methodologies. We are combining research, teaching, and evaluation expertise and resources from several academic departments and labs at the University of Arizona. Four key contributing entities are: (1) the Economic Science Lab, a premier institution on experimental economics methodology and applications, (2) the Artificial Intelligence Lab, a leading institution on DL, Internet computing, and software agents, (3) the Hoffman E- Commerce Lab, an instructional and research facility focusing on e-commerce teaching and research, and (4) the University Faculty Center for Instructional Innovation, a teaching evaluation facility with emphasis on the impact of IT on education.