Interaction paradigms with educational hypermedia

Abstract

This paper discusses two projects aimed at utilising the educational potential of hypermedia whilst avoiding the danger of the user becoming "lost in I?yperspace". The $rst project adopts a connectionist approach to con$gure dynamically the links made available to the user. The paper outlines the neural network approaches adopted and reports on results to date. The second project concerns the development of educational packages providing a range of navigational aids to the user, and the paper reports on empirical work involving the use of such a package by students in a tutorial context. 1) IntroductionIn the face of growing economic pressures, Leeds Metropolitan University is seeking increasingly to use educational hypermedia [l] to solve the practical problems of providing for increasing student numbers given static or decreasing resources, a widespread problem shared with many other educational institutions [2]. Use of educational hypermedia raises a number of user interface issues, a major one of which concerns user navigation. The issue is how, on the one hand, to prevent the user from becoming overwhelmed with information and losing track of where they are going, whilst on the other hand permitting them to make the most of the facilities the hypermedia offers.Two broad approaches to th~s issue can be identified. One is to restrict the number of links made available to the student. The concem that this might lead to an impoverished set of learning opportunities can be countered by seeking dynamically to configure the available links as the user proceeds. A second approach is to make all the links available but seek to assist the user by one or more navigational aids. We are currently conducting research concerning both of these approaches, and seelung to combine this with our ongoing educational provision, with a view to offering our students increasingly powerful student-based learning opportunities. This paper will review our research on each of these approaches in turn. 2) Restricting links through adaptive hypermediaElsom-Cook 131 argues that the perfect tutoring system should be able to slide between the two extremes of total constraint and total absence of constraint, according to the student's needs and current state of knowledge. In a similar vein, Hartley (141, cf.[5]) argues that when there is a mismatch between the strategy of the learning system and learning style of the student, performance is degraded, suggesting a need for support for different styles and viewpoints of users. With this in mind, one of our aims is to build hypermedia systems with the ability to adapt to their students' needs as they progress from novice to expert users, and ultimately to modify their strategy according to their experiences with other students ([b], [7]). Our current prototypes achieve this via a combination of knowledge-based representations (which we refer to as "semantic hypermedia") and neural network models (konnectionist modelling").We argue that this approach overcomes two major concerns in the domain of ...

Collaborative Virtual Environment Technology for People With Autism

“…There is often a trade-off between control and realism (cf. Moore, Hobbs, Mullier, & Bell, 1997), and our current study has favored the latter, albeit perhaps at the expense of the former.…”