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Maintenance of Learner’s Characteristics by Spreading a Change Michal Šimún, Anton Andrejko and Mária Bieliková Slovak University of Technology, Faculty of Informatics and Information Technologies, Institute of Informatics and Software Engineering Ilkovi?ova 3, 842 16 Bratislava 4, Slovakia simun.michal@yahoo.com, {andrejko,bielik}@fiit.stuba.sk WWW home page: http://www.fiit.stuba.sk Abstract. Learners have different knowledge, interests and also goals in any educational process. If all the learners are provided the same content the process will probably not meet expected goals. A personalized approach to a learner increases the efficiency of the learning process. It is based on information about the learner that is subject of change. Several adaptive educational systems exist. However, they usually do not consider changes in user behavior and relationships that may exist among contents in order to maintain learner characteristics. In this paper we present a novel method for maintenance of user’s characteristics based on spreading activation. 1 Introduction Good educational process strongly depends on a combination of the best learning sources aimed at achieving high quality while using the most effective methods of education as possible. Web-based educational applications provide huge amounts of information from various areas that are presented to learners, but usually do not consider the learner’s individual knowledge or interest. Such a learner might be provided with content that he/she is not ready to study at that time, is not interested in, or can not find suitable information in large knowledge spaces. Increased efficiency of learning process requires a personalized approach to a learner where characteristics for each learner are modeled in a user oriented model which is used to select the most suitable study material for an individual learner. In this approach the key requirement is to accurately estimate the individual learner’s characteristics. There are several ways to model characteristics in a user model. The most common approaches are stereotype [1] and layered [2, 3] user model. In the stereotype approach learners are divided into groups according to the selected difficulty of course. Each learner is assigned to one stereotype only and is provided Please use the following format when citing this chapter: Šimún, M., Andrejko, A. and Bieliková, M., 2008, in IFIP International Federation for Information Processing, Volume 281; Learning to Live in the Knowledge Society; Michael Kendall and Brian Samways; (Boston: Springer), pp. 223–226.