User centered design of hypertext and hypermedia for education

Abstract

Winner of the 1997 Brown Publication Award from ECT. This item is not the definitive copy. Please use the following citation when referencing this material: McKnight, C., Dillon, A., and Richardson, J. (1996) User Centered Design of Hypertext and Hypermedia for Education. In: D. Jonassen (ed) Handbook of Research on Educational Communications and Technology. New York: Macmillan, 622-633 Abstract The chapter begins by describing the fundamental concepts of hypertext and gives a brief overview of the different philosophical perspectives manifest in the key figures of the field. It then considers the role of hypertext in learning, concluding from a review of empirical evaluations that many of the claims for hypertext have failed to be substantiated. It is argued that for a variety of conceptual and methodological reasons, it is extremely difficult to evaluate hypertext experimentally in an educational context. However, rather than simply abandon either hypertext or empirical evaluation, the chapter concludes by arguing for an empirically grounded, user centred approach to the design of hypertext based on a knowledge of the users, their tasks, the information space and the context in which the three interact.