Peter Whalley

Models of hypertext structure and learning

The dominant conception of the hypertext form is a medium for information retrieval rather than learning, and where learning is considered, it is usually only of a fairly rudimentary form. An important question is whether the ‘control’ given to the hypertext user may be merely illusory, since the fragmenting effect of the non-linear text forms can make it more difficult for the reader to perceive an author’s intended argument structure. The artefacts introduced by the hypertext form, in order to improve accessibility, mitigate against its use as the principal teaching medium. It is suggested that designers of hypertext materials might usefully adopt some of the supposed constraints of the linear text form, and that until various problems have been overcome, hypertext might best be used to supplement rather than supplant printed materials for many learning purposes.

Imagining with multimedia

The computer was first seen as a calculating engine, and only more recently as a way to view and manipulate the dynamic media. Now as a tool for imagining the computer allows us to explore and think ‘What if?’ about imagined objects and situations. In this paper an analysis is made of the image types that best support engaged multimedia interactivity and which can contribute to the perception of multimedia as a resource for imaginative teaching and learning.

A general purpose computer aid to judgemental forecasting: Rationale and procedure

Abstract Here we describe the rationale, procedures and use of a general purpose computer aid to judgemental forecasting. First, we review empirical studies of unaided judgemental forecasting and we identify suboptimalities in such probabilistic judgements. Next we present a description of ‘Forecast’, illustrating how the programs procedures aid judgemental forecasting by enabling the forecaster to produce coherent and consistent probabilities. The program aids three types of forecasting: first, of the time period or date when a specified event may happen, e.g. the value of UK £1.00 falling below US

Making control technology work in the classroom

1.30; second, the possible outcomes of an event when these can be expressed in numerical terms as outcomes on a single continuous scale , e.g. company profits; third, the possible outcomes of an event when these can be expressed as discrete or discontinuous outcomes , e.g. the winner of a horse race.

The Role of the Virtual Microscope in Distance Learning.

Considerable emphasis is now being given to the use of control technology in the classroom. Using a microcomputer in this way to control physical micro-worlds can be an interesting and powerful educational experience, and it is viewed as a good way to provide practical experience of programmable systems that are familiar to children, eg traffic lights, lifts, level crossings etc. Teachers using this technology usually also have the intention of encouraging general problem solving skills and ‘systems thinking’. Unfortunately there is often a gulf between these aims and what happens in the classroom. Higher order goals are frequently lost in the attempt to cope with the presently available control technology environments. An additional concern is that the literature suggests that girls perform much less well in these environments than might be expected. The author considers how far the characteristics of the programming languages used in control technology might be influencing this pattern of outcomes, and suggests that the difficulties might be overcome by presenting the tasks in a more appropriate form to grasp the interest and imagination of a wider range of children. The first part describes the development of a system for teaching control technology that is based on an alternative metaphor to that underlying the conventional control languages. The second part deals with some of the challenges involved in evaluating computer systems in the classroom. A pilot study is reported which examined gender differences in the context of a ‘buggy’ control task.

Interacting with layered dynamic media—some educational aspects of MPEG‐4

Screen‐based microscopes allow for a shared visualisation and task‐directed conversations that offer significant pedagogic advantages for the science disciplines involving observation of natural samples such as the geosciences and biosciences, and particularly for distance education in these disciplines. The role and development of a virtual microscope used in the undergraduate teaching of geoscience at the Open University is discussed and then related to current developments in the collaborative web‐based technologies and mobile computing.

Representing Parallelism in a Control Language Designed for Young Children

The role that layered, time-synchronised media might play in the design of interactive learning environments is examined both in terms of their initial construction, and also in regard to how they might be later re-engineered and shared. Although the eventual scale of adoption of the new Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) media types will be governed by commercial factors, their wide availability would offer considerable benefit to the development of innovative forms of educational interactive multimedia.

Argument in Text and Reading Process

Actor-lab was intended to make control problems comprehensible to young children experiencing programming for the first time, and to provide an interface around which they could have learning conversations. The design goal was to create an expressive high-level control language that could incorporate the WHEN DEMON metaphor within the intrinsically parallel actor programming paradigm. Information about the static relationship between the objects in the system, the external dynamic events and the internal message passing is provided by the visualisation. The learner-centered evolution of actor-lab is detailed in terms of how successfully it both reflects the curriculum model of control and also engenders a sense of agency within the system

Modifying the metaphor in order to improve understanding of control languages—the little‐person becomes a cast of actors

Measures of reading rate have conventionally been held to relate to the syntactic structure of text. Eye movement studies directed at the level of recognition find reading rate to be a function of syntactic and lexical complexity. However experiments focusing on comprehension, and therefore using longer texts, indicate a relation between the reading process and the macro propositional structure of text. The authors assigned relevance (in van Dijks terms) appears to be the major determining factor of reading rate. The implications of the predictive potential of the authors argument structure for the study of active, flexible reading of book length texts is discussed, and a general methodology for experimentation at this level is put forward.