Self-regulated adaptivity as a design and authoring support tool

This paper discusses the changes self-regulated adaptivity will potentially bring about in the culture of designing and authoring adaptive systems. Two dimensions are explored in parallel: the opportunities arising from the employment of self-regulation itself as a tool that can facilitate the design of adaptation; and, the additional requirements self-regulation places upon the traditional authoring process and on the adaptive system itself. The discussion is structured around a specific example tackling an often-discussed problem in the domain of adaptive course delivery systems: adaptive annotation of conceptbased hypermedia links. The paper builds upon this example to argue that selfregulation is a viable solution to the "ground up" design of adaptive systems, and may be used even in (or, for that matter, best suit) cases where there is little empirically validated evidence to support design decisions.