External Navigation Control and Guidance for Learning with Spatial Hypermedia

• Main Authors: Antoon Verhoeven, Kai Warendorf
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Ubiquity Press 1999-03-01
• Series: Journal of Interactive Media in Education
• Subjects: Adaptive Hypermedia; Spatial Hypermedia; authoring environment
• Online Access: https://jime.open.ac.uk/articles/29

Abstract: The World Wide Web has become a widely available platform for learning with hypermedia. However, WWW hypermedia is often limited in both guidance and navigation support. To improve hypermedia in these aspects, we propose a spatial hypermedia browser for educational purposes. A prototype browser, named HyperMap, has been designed to integrate guided explorative browsing with external control over a learnerís navigation. The flexible control by authors over navigation allows the integration of traditional courseware elements into hypermedia. We explain how the direct manipulation authoring environment in HyperMap simplifies the construction of a curriculum in spatial hypermedia. Object libraries and scripting of adaptive hypermedia objects help a HyperMap author to be productive. We include recent follow-up field-tests at NTU that confirmed the effectiveness of learning with HyperMap spatial hypermedia. The theoretical prospects of further integration of hypermedia with rules for intelligent tutoring are outlined as well. Editors: Gerry Stahl (U. Colorado).Reviewers: Chaomei Chen (Brunel U.), Jim Hewitt (OISE, U. Toronto), Timothy Koschmann (Southern Illinois U.), Rogerio dePaula (U. Colorado), Lydia Plowman (Scottish Council for Research in Education), Frank Shipman (Texas A&M U.)Interactive elements: 'The HyperMap system described in this article is provided as a Java applet'.Interactive demonstrations: A Java applet of the HyperMap system is embedded in this article (<A HREF="verhoeven-99-1-19.html">Appendix</A>) for which you will need a Java-aware web browser compatible with Sun's JDK 1.1.4 or higher (Internet Explorer 4.0 and Netscape Navigator 4.5 work without difficulty). If you have these, you can try the demo now (<A href="applet/netscape.html" target="hmap-netscape-demo">Netscape 4.5+</A> | <A href="applet/iexplorer.html" target="hmap-explorer-demo">Explorer 4.0+</A>). A local copy of the system can be downloaded for offline execution from the <A HREF="http://members.xoom.com/tverhoeven/">HyperMap site</A>, or from JIME (Mac: <A HREF="JIME-HyperMap-applet.sea">JIME-HyperMap-applet.sea</A> | PC/Unix: <A HREF="JIME-HyperMap-applet.zip">JIME-HyperMap-applet.zip</A>).