programmed learning question generator
Programmed learning can be a good method for people with short attention spans. It's a brute-force way of making progress, when one lacks or is unable to follow through with a study plan.

metaeducat10n gave me this concept on this previous entry of mine about "smart text", where I suggested that it should be easy to automatically generate study questions from source text.

At a basic level, the system can only do some simple NLP, and can only generate "regurgitate"-type questions.

At a higher level, the system could generate questions that demand some reasoning (deduction, abduction) from the student, using common-sense facts (for this, we need some integration with a common-sense database). This way, one can test a deeper level of understanding and integration with other knowledge.

Of course, we're going to run into SW-hard (semantic-web hard) problems.

I wonder if a corpus of questions and answers about text could be the basis for understanding of the domain. Could Google Answers become a good foundation for truly intelligent question answering?