Distance Learning of Skills

With the increasing globalization and expansion of the people’s activities, distance learning is getting wide attention. Distance learning is not a computer aided education system alone. What is important is that collaboration over the network is a prerequisite for that, so that the technology developed there will be easily utilized for distance manufacturing and other collaborative activities over the network. When we come to think of integrating design and manufacturing over the network, the problem of skill comes up. Skill plays a very important role in manufacturing. But most of the systems developed so far have been focusing their chief attention toward how rigously they can represent design and manufacturing knowledge and experience in terms of symbols, and non-symbolic approaches are still few. It is believed that motion occupies a large portion of skills, but the present systems being such, and in additon, such media as TV, video, etc are one way from a teacher to a student so that it is still very difficult to learn skills over the network, since skill learning requires much interactive processes. Otherwise, students find it very difficult what part of the model motion they should concentrate their focuses. If a teacher can edit the motion of a student and a student can watch how his or her motion is edited, the student will understand more easily what is wrong with his or her motion., and can identify where his or her attention should be focused. Based on this idea, we have developed a preliminary system for distance learning of skills to demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach.