Gerard Hutchings

Authoring and evaluation of hypermedia for education

Abstract Hypermedia encompasses the modes of learning and interaction associated with conventional CAL, but it also allows greater learner control, access to multimedia learning materials and a variety of modalities of interaction with the learning material which are only now becoming apparent. Nevertheless, for a hypermedia document to be educationally effective, the author must consider the learning goals and activities it must support, how the nature of the domain will relate to the learning activities, and how learners will differ, and then provide appropriate support tools. Authoring large hypermedia documents demands facilities to manage links, and to create them automatically. Methods considered included the creation of generic links, applicable to more than one document, use of knowledge-based rules to generate links, and the use of file interchange formats for reusability of information. Authors should avoid the dominant browse and retrieve model and consider a range of activities—in any case simple hypertext has been shown to be insufficient for effective learning. Evaluation of such systems and materials in use has many facets, including usability, the effectiveness of guidance tools, the learning achieved. Evaluation of hypermedia systems is different from CAL because of the new vocabulary and syntax of interaction which is required.

Using HyperCard and Interactive Video in Education: An Application in Cell Biology

Interactive video seems to have much potential in education, particularly in areas where the use of visual material is essential to the understanding of the subject Finding effective ways of incorporating videodisc material into educational courses is not easy. Producing courseware for interactive video to intergrate with existing courses can be very expensive, particularly in terms of staff time This paper suggests an alternative model for the development of interactive video material for education using existing videodiscs and Apples HyperCard

Exploiting serendipity amongst users to provide support for hypertext navigation

The aim of the MEMOIR Project is to demonstrate the applicability and integration of advanced, distributed multimedia information systems to support the management of, and access to, diverse sources of technical information in large R&D-based corporations. The key technologies within the system are an object-oriented database, hypermedia link services and autonomous software agents.

Breaking down the barriers: an architecture for developing and delivering resource based learning materials

In this paper we explore the barriers which currently exist to the successful integration of computer based materials into everyday teaching and learning. These barriers are both technological and cultural. We argue that a major shift in educational practice will not take place until we change the whole philosophy of the culture of production of computer based learning materials to that of a resource based approach. Such material should be integrated with, rather than isolated from, standard computer applications and should be easily customizable and extensible. We suggest an architecture which promotes this approach based on Microcosm, an open hypermedia software platform which has been developed at the University of Southampton. We use examples from the Scholar Project at Southampton to demonstrate how this approach can be successfully applied on an institutional basis.

Applying Hypermedia to Medical Education: An Author's Perspective.

Interactive learning by computer is adopting an increasingly important role in medical education in many countries. Traditional methods of medical education can be enhanced and augmented by the addition of self‐directed computer‐assisted learning. While it is desirable for specialists in a medical content to create their own computer‐based teaching programmes, authoring with hypertext and multimedia can pose significant difficulties for non‐computer programmes. This paper describes how the authors approached the design and creation of a medical education programme on sexually transmitted diseases using StackMaker, a new hypermedia authoring environment.

Interactive Learning and Biology: A Hypermedia Approach

The terms hypertext and hypermedia are becoming very well-known in computing literature. More and more software packages that have the look and feel of hypermedia systems are coming into the market and their use is set to increase rapidly. But there has been very little work done on the effectiveness of such interfaces in teaching and learning. This paper reports on a project being undertaken at t h e University of Southampton to evaluate a hypermedia system that has been developed for use in education. The project concentrates particularly on the integration of graphics and video information into the system, and has been applied to an area of biology education.

The microcosm link service (abstract): an integrating technology

The Microcosm hypermedia system is currently implemented in C under Microsoft Windows. Macintosh and Unix/Xversions have been prototype. The video shows the MS Windows version which is the most fully developed and has been integrated with several Windows applications. Microcosm consists of a number of viewers which allow the user to view and interact with many different formats of information. The viewers communicate with Microcosm which then sends messages through a filter chain. Important filters are the link databases, or linkbases, In Microcosm, documents are not marked up internally: the link data is held in these separate link bases, and the viewers communicate with the linkbases to establish what buttons and links exist relevant to a particular document. The Microcosm model allows a spectrum of link types. At one end of this spectrum are specific links or buttons which are manually authored links from a fixed source point to a destination point, Generic links are links that have a fixed destination but which may be followed from any point in any document where the appropriate object (such as a text selection) occurs. At the other end of the spectrum are computed links. These links are generated dynamically using information retrieval techniques, for example. An important feature of Microcosm is the facility to dynamically install filters, particularly linkbases. It is common for a user to have at least two linkbases in the filter chain. One will be the application’s Iinkbase which will contain links made by the original author. Another will belong to the user, and will contain personal link information and annotations. It is thus possible to have one set of multimedia documents, with a number of different linkbases that might contain completely separate views on the same set of information. If required, a user could install more than one such linkbase at a time and use the union of these sets of links. The Microcosm model provides a link service using which it is possible to follow links into and out of applications that are not part of Microcosm. Many Windows application packages have facilities that permit programmable communication with the Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) and in this case it is possible to treat such an application as a Microcosm viewer. When it is not possible to communicate via the DDE, links can be followed by simply cutting and pasting a selection to the clipboard. The openness of the model, allows selections to be any data objects. Perm”

Authoring with Open Hypermedia

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Implementing Open Hypermedia: Microcosm

1,50 Hypertext ’93 Proceedings 231 November 1993 This has been used to full effect in the integration of Microcosm with Autocad, where the selection of an Autocad object is used as the basis of link retrieval, and with the SPANS GIS system, where the selection of a coordinate in a SPANS map is used similarly. The video shows examples of all these techniques based on material taken from some of the many applications that have been developed using Microcosm, including a historical archive, medical education and urban planning applications. REFERENCES [1] Fountain, A.,Hall, W., Heath, I. & Davis, H. “Microcosm: An Open Model for Hypermedia with Dynamic Linking” in Hypertext: Concepts, Systems and Applications, Proceedings of ECHT90 (eds. A. Rizk, N. Streitz & J, Andre)Cambridge University Press, pp 298-311 (1990). [2] Davis, H,,Hall, W., Heath, I., Hill, G, & Wilkins, R. “Towards an Integrated Information Environment with Open Hypermedia Systems” in the Proceedingsof the ACM Conference on Hypertext (ECHT’92), ACM Press, pp 181-190 (1992) Hypertext ’93 Proceedings 232 November 1993