Experiences Migrating Microcosm Learning Materials

Microcosm was an open hypertext system that evolved in the early 1990s, before the advent of the Web. Apart from its success as a research platform it was widely used for presenting interactive educational materials. Since the commercial version of the product ceased to be supported it became necessary for users to migrate their educational materials, generally to the Web. However, the SToMP consortium chose to implement their own environment copying parts of the functionality of Microcosm in order to achieve their educational objectives. This paper examines the motivations of this work in order to understand whether there were features that were available in Microcosm that were not replicated in current Web based solutions

From classroom tutor to hypertext adviser: An evaluation

This paper describes a three‐year experiment to investigate the possibility of making economies by replacing practical laboratory sessions with courseware while attempting to ensure that the quality of the student learning experience did not suffer. Pathology labs are a central component of the first‐year medical undergraduate curriculum at Southampton. Activities in these labs had been carefully designed and they were supervised by lab demonstrators who were subject domain experts. The labs were successful in the eyes of both staff and students but were expensive to conduct, in terms of equipment and staffing. Year by year evaluation of the introduction of courseware revealed that there was no measurable difference in student performance as a result of introducing the courseware, but that students were unhappy about the loss of interaction with the demonstrators. The final outcome of this experiment was a courseware replacement for six labs which included a software online hypertext adviser. The contribution of this work is that it adds to the body of empirical evidence in support of the importance of maintaining dialogue with students when introducing courseware, and it presents an example of how this interaction might be achieved in software

How to make classrooms creative and open spaces: ARIS games, digital artifacts and storytelling

As part of long-term research into interviewing users and visualizing digital artifacts, we have created a parallel archives of projects in our classroom. Ethnography helps us to discover the temporal trends of interactions with students and with the virtual environment. The outcomes expected motived us to repurpouse stories we co-create with students in a new form, retelling motivations, design, narratives, into a gaming scenario where the use of experiences become more digital and less tangible but always snapshots of their social existence.Peer Reviewe

The multimedia brain

The Open University is producing an interactive multimedia tutorial on the brain and nervous system on CD-ROM, for use in its Biology: Brain and Behaviour course. Such a tutor could have a wider use in higher education as the subject matter is known to be difficult for students to master. A prototype version has been produced. Consultation is now taking place before work starts on a fully functional version that can be evaluated for educational effectiveness

Separable Hyperstructure and Delayed Link Binding

As the amount of material on the World Wide Web continues to grow, users are discovering that the Web's embedded, hard-coded, links are difficult to maintain and update. Hyperlinks need a degree of abstraction in the way they are specified together with a sound underlying document structure and the property of separability from the documents they are linking. The case is made by studying the advantages of program/data separation in computer system architectures and also by re-examining some selected hypermedia systems that have already implemented separability. The prospects for introducing more abstract links into future versions of HTML and PDF, via emerging standards such as XPath, XPointer XLink and URN, are briefly discussed

Augmenting applications with hyper media, functionality and meta-information

The Dynamic Hypermedia Engine (DHE) enhances analytical applications by adding relationships, semantics and other metadata to the application\u27s output and user interface. DHE also provides additional hypermedia navigational, structural and annotation functionality. These features allow application developers and users to add guided tours, personal links and sharable annotations, among other features, into applications. DHE runs as a middleware between the application user interface and its business logic and processes, in a n-tier architecture, supporting the extra functionalities without altering the original systems by means of application wrappers. DHE automatically generates links at run-time for each of those elements having relationships and metadata. Such elements are previously identified using a Relation Navigation Analysis. DHE also constructs more sophisticated navigation techniques not often found on the Web on top of these links. The metadata, links, navigation and annotation features supplement the application\u27s primary functionality. This research identifies element types, or classes , in the application displays. A mapping rule encodes each relationship found between two elements of interest at the class level . When the user selects a particular element, DHE instantiates the commands included in the rules with the actual instance selected and sends them to the appropriate destination system, which then dynamically generates the resulting virtual (i.e. not previously stored) page. DHE executes concurrently with these applications, providing automated link generation and other hypermedia functionality. DHE uses the extensible Markup Language (XMQ -and related World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) sets of XML recommendations, like Xlink, XML Schema, and RDF -to encode the semantic information required for the operation of the extra hypermedia features, and for the transmission of messages between the engine modules and applications. DHE is the only approach we know that provides automated linking and metadata services in a generic manner, based on the application semantics, without altering the applications. DHE will also work with non-Web systems. The results of this work could also be extended to other research areas, such as link ranking and filtering, automatic link generation as the result of a search query, metadata collection and support, virtual document management, hypermedia functionality on the Web, adaptive and collaborative hypermedia, web engineering, and the semantic Web

A Study of Information Fragment Association in Information Management and Retrieval Applications

As we strive to identify useful information sifting through the vast number of resources available to us, we often find that the desired information is residing in a small section within a larger body of content which does not necessarily contain similar information. This can make this Information Fragment difficult to find. A Web search engine may not provide a good ranking to a page of unrelated content if it contains only a very small yet invaluable piece of relevant information. This means that our processes often fail to bring together related Information Fragments. We can easily conceive of two Information Fragments which according to a scholar bear a strong association with each other, yet contain no common keywords enabling them to be collocated by a keyword search.This dissertation attempts to address this issue by determining the benefits of enhancing information management and retrieval applications by providing users with the capability of establishing and storing associations between Information Fragments. It estimates the extent to which the efficiency and quality of information retrieval can be improved if users are allowed to capture mental associations they form while reading Information Fragments and share these associations with others using a functional registry-based design. In order to test these benefits three subject groups were recruited and assigned tasks involving Information Fragments. The first two tasks compared the performance and usability of a mainstream social bookmarking tool with a tool enhanced with Information Fragment Association capabilities. The tests demonstrated that the use of Information Fragment Association offers significant advantages both in the efficiency of retrieval and user satisfaction. Analysis of the results of the third task demonstrated that a mainstream Web search engine performed poorly in collocating interrelated fragments when a query designed to retrieve the one of these fragments was submitted. The fourth task demonstrated that Information Fragment Association improves the precision and recall of searches performed on Information Fragment datasets.The results of this study indicate that mainstream information management and retrieval applications provide inadequate support for Information Fragment retrieval and that their enhancement with Information Fragment Association capabilities would be beneficial

Toward a working theory of queer hypermedia: An analysis of queer textual structures in gone home and what remains of Edith Finch

In this project, I analyze two video games, Gone Home (Fullbright Company 2013) and What Remains of Edith Finch (Giant Sparrow 2017), through a queer theoretical framework, focusing on three specific features of the games: 1) their status as open world games, 2) the agency given to players in interactions with objects, and 3) how ambiguous player-character identity is used to create a sense of estrangement in the player. I use these features to argue for a specifically queer theoretical approach to hypermedia, which is attentive to the process of how players create an identity for themselves within the game world. I also introduce the concept of the reader-player, a term that I believe (more accurately than reader or player alone) represents the cognitive/embodied approach that reader-players bring to hypermedia texts