e-Rural: A Framework to Generate Hyperdocuments for Milk Producers with Different Levels of Literacy to Promote Better Quality Milking

Abstract

We created and tested e-Rural, an approach to allow educators to dynamically adjust the target literacy level for their online learning content using a combination of three tools: PACO-T for planning, COGNITOR for editing hyper documents and Simplifica for text simplification. PACO-T and COGNITOR use the Brazilian Open Mind Common Sense knowledgebase (OMCS-Br) to provide access to commonly held understandings and beliefs on a diverse set of topics associated with a large range of Brazilian demographics, including, people with low literacy. We tested our experiment with 13 users that were creating hyperdocument-based learning content to describe important methods to milk production. We chose milk production as this is one of Brazil’s primary agricultural products and yet it has been established that there is a wide gap between the content from researchers with methods to greatly enhance the quality and economic power of milk production and the tacit knowledge and procedures of the farmers who actually produce the milk who are often at low literacy levels consistent with Brazil’s low literacy levels being around 75% of the population. Our experiments reveal that educators are able to produce milk related learning content geared towards different literacy levels using our tools with a very satisfying efficacy and efficiency levels. Thus, we believe that the use of our approach that introduces demographically sensitive common sense holds promise to bridge the gap between high literacy researchers with evidence-based approach to milk production and tacitly-based, low-literacy milk producers to better develop the milk industry in Brazil.