Why Laughing is Better than SMILing

Dialectically sharing knowledge everywhere, every time and, above all, very fast – as it is nowadays possible-has revealed the existence and importance of a common, distributed intelligence growing with the contribution of many individuals (a community). The iterating refinement of any information resource by a wider and wider community of sharers leads to undoubted advantages on the final quality and effectiveness of use of this information. Following this path and focusing on the e-learning field, we present a novel system, termed LAUGH, for the cooperative creation and sharing of SMIL-based multimedia resources. Such a system allows users (typically learners and teachers) to enrich the didactical material made available to the learning community. Specifically, they can add captions/subtitles and alternative annotations to the original multimedia contents by resorting to a Wiki-type interface. This open process promotes students' participation, data decentralization, assemblage from diverse sources, sharing of knowledge as well as an improvement to the efficacy of e-learning materials. Throughout the paper, we will meticulously show that LAUGH extends and improves the functionalities provided by the SMIL standard. This motivates the title of this article.