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The World Wide Web and Distance Education: Congergenece or Cacophony?
Ray Archee
University of Western
Sydney, Nepean
AUSTRALIA
rarchee@extro.ucc.su.oz.au
Ann Hill Duin
University of Minnesota
USA
ahduin@maroon.tc.umn.edu
- Abstract
- The World Wide Web has seen phenomenal growth in the past two years, surpassing any other use of the Internet. User-friendly front-ends such as Netscape and Mosaic have enabled the potential of distance education/open learning mode for almost any course from any discipline. But is the use of the WWW for distance education and open learning premature? Apart from speed and efficiency there seems to be no other guiding principles for using the WWW for distance education/open learning. Hypertext is certainly innovative and highly instrumental in information provision, but what about community, mentoring and motivation? This paper critiques the WWW in the light of its existing educational use. Possible problems include ideological objections, educational limitations and technical issues. Three theories: cognitive theory; social constructionist theory; and dramaturgical theory are examined for possible starting points for a WWW distance education/open learning pedagogy.
- Keywords
- WWW, Theory, problems, critique, pedagogy.
Convergence
Since its beginnings in 1982, the Internet has been a huge sprawling collection of networks which is chaotic, disorganised and difficult to search for even the experienced user. The World Wide Web was an attempt to produce some sort of convergence out of this tumultuous collection of files. In many ways the WWW embodies the best aspects of every other Internet application that preceded it. It has the searchability of WAIS, the universality of Archie, and the ease of Gopher, and adds its unique ability to utilise hyperlinks.What we have today is a convergence of applications (telnet, ftp, the Usenet, e-mail, gopher, chat, and virtual reality); a convergence of work contexts (business, academia, government and the general public); a convergence of skills (management and MIS divisions are becoming one in the same); and a convergence of ideas, such as "information wants to be free"; "no-one should own the Internet"; and "the Internet is the best way to do business, educate people" (NII, 1994) and be real cool.. (Billy Idol's home page, 1994).
Cacophony
But there is some cause for alarm - there are some warning signs on the Web today. Whilst there is no sound in Cyberspace there is an increasing melae of assorted sites, indexes and (un)helpful pages. URL's cacophonously assert their presence in list announcements, Usenet posts, and on Web search engines (if you can submit the form) but how much is really effectual or even interesting? How much of the Web is merely about self-interest, and aggrandisement of ordinary consumer goods in an alternative medium allowing 24 hours a day, 7 days a week access - the perfect 7-Eleven store never in danger of being robbed? Whether the advertisement is for a product, a service or merely proffering a clever mind, is the Web turning into a huge Infomercial? Those American docu-ads that pervade late-nite television are now prime time on the Internet.A mere three years ago our Internet list of choice was the Net-happenings list where we would receive a dozen or so messages per day. Each message was a distinct category such as a site announcement for gopher, ftp, telnet, hytelnet, or MISC entry. These days 95% of the announcements are for new Web sites, meaning that all other Internet development has basically ceased and is in the process of being replaced by some sort of WWW interface. There seems to be no new ftp or gopher archives, only Web pages. Whilst we appreciate the Web and find it easy to use, we bemoan the loss of the other applications. The Internet used to be a diverse, albeit motley collection of networks, ftp, gopher and telnet sites. To the majority of new users, the Internet consists of clicking on the large N icon and waiting for the new URL and pretty pictures.
WWW and Current Distance Education Practice
We see the WWW currently being used in diverse ways, depending on whether a course has been designed for resident learners, non-resident learners, a combination of resident and non-resident learners, or corporate learners, or whether the course is for use in conjunction with future learning environments. The following scenarios represent current uses of the Web.
The undergraduate students in the Internet research course are predominantly novice Internet users. They meet once a week for a one hour lecture and a two-hour workshop. The workshop is conducted in a lab of 486DX33's connected to the local area network. Typically a student will log in to the university's Unix computer system and perform all activities in terminal mode. The instructor has set up a special course "home page" on the World Wide Web (WWW) for computer-assisted learning. Each week new information, exercises and references are added to the WWW home page, which is accessed through the vt-100 browser, Lynx. Each workshop, students spend time browsing the home page, reading through the new materials, checking out hypertext references and links, and completing class exercises.
Although the WWW is extremely useful for lesson preparation and is perfectly in tune with the course content, not all students can adjust to the totally on-screen presentation. Some students persist in downloading files and printing hardcopy, while others take electronic copies away on disk for later perusal at home. Contrary to expectation, the instructor is always heavily in demand during such workshops, answering questions, explaining technical details and troubleshooting student problems, and working to meld the myriad of choices into an understandable whole for the students. The instructor is absolutely essential in this class; the WWW is used as a 24-hour-a-day glorified whiteboard.
The undergraduate and graduate students are in six different time zones, three different countries, and represent all ages and needs. Located where no technical communication programs exist, the students heard about the Document Design course via the Internet. Similar to many distance education courses placed on the Web, students access the materials via the Web itself or through locally-distributed copies. Students take the course at their own pace, joining in discussions with those students enrolling within a similar time period to when they started. Students use electronic mail to ask questions, and during specific time slots, they join a multi-user, object-oriented, text environment (MOO) to discuss the information in the modules. Come test time, students receive a password, access the exam, and submit their work using Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), a program to ensure that their exact text arrives unchanged.
Since a major component of the course concerns the design of multimedia documents, students develop their own WWW home pages and discuss their design decisions with the instructor via IRC. Contrary to expectation, the instructor is always heavily in demand via electronic mail to answer questions, explain technical details, troubleshoot student problems, and blend the technological choices into a coherent electronic learning environment. The instructor is absolutely essential in this class; the WWW is used as a 24-hour-a-day glorified whiteboard sprinkled with a bit of interactivity via e-mail and the MOO.
The corporate learners - technical communicators in a variety of industries - access this module during their lunch breaks, telecommuting days, or whenever a meeting is serendipitously cancelled. Flung into the world marketplace, they need theory and practical guidelines on collaborating with people from different cultures, continents, and hemispheres. Through the WWW, they learn about a course module on cross- cultural collaboration and decide to access it. Once accessed, they read the overview of the course and decide to take it, sending their credit card information (via PGP) to the host institution. The next time they log on, they find that an instructor has greeted them and introduced them to the first lesson. They read through the lesson, deciding whether or not to continue with the course. If they decide to continue, their credit card transaction is processed.
Learners have the option to receive only information delivery (tailored to their needs after completion of an online questionnaire); information plus a mentoring experience (in which an instructor interacts weekly with them via electronic mail); or information, mentoring, and assessment, in which case they would also receive exams, course credit and a grade for the course. As part of the mentoring experience, learners connect with people from other cultures who are also taking the course. They participate in listserv discussions and in some cases, collaborate with people from other cultures. Learners take the course at their own pace and work on projects relevant to their current workplace contexts. Contrary to expectation, the instructor is always heavily in demand to configure the information to meet the individual learner's needs, locate WWW sites relevant to the corporate learner's interests, answer questions, connect diverse learners and coordinate their interaction schedules, explain technical details and troubleshoot problems. The instructor is absolutely essential in this class; the WWW is used as the interface for information delivery, mentoring, and assessment.
It is noteworthy that in every case described above, the instructor is absolutely essential to the whole process. We think that the instructor is even more necessary than in traditional distance education and ordinary face to face learning environments. It is predicted that by the year 2000 around 75% of the American workforce will need retraining (Carol Twigg, Vice-President of EDUCOM, 1995) and most educators are viewing the WWW as a perfect candidate for effecting this process. But look at the three main components of traditional, face to face education:
- Information delivery - usually accomplished through lectures and
workshops;
- Mentoring - accomplished through discussion, face to face interaction,
and written interaction via essays, reports etc;
- Assessment - usually accomplished via exams, tests, papers and assignments.
The current WWW is effective at only the information delivery part of the process. Educators must use other Internet applications such as e-mail, MUD's/MOO's, IRC, or desktop videoconferencing in order to meet the other two components. The Web by itself is not enough. In fact it is mainly used as a whiteboard - able to hold references, lecture notes, and relatively fast instructor jottings. But the Web cannot realistically do everything at present.
Problems with the WWW
Current problems with the WWW typically fall into three broad categories: ideological, educational and technical. Each set of problems affects distance learning in unique ways.
The phenomenal rate of home page production is seemingly the result of two forces in the community: individual experimentation by students of all sorts; and marketing efforts by business interests. The glitzy WWW is in its current form probably best suited for a controlled, direct, one-way connection between the instructor and the learner or between a company and a potential customer. The Web perfectly fits a traditional teacher-centred paradigm or the traditional model of marketing and public relations. The danger exists that instructors will saturate the WWW with semi-useless, and unchanging course offerings and that marketeers will make the WWW untenable for anything else. Do we really need blatant advertisements for our distance education courses? Think of the Netscape home page - are we really enamoured with these blatant advertisements when we boot up Netscape? With both business and education sharing the same system, will it be possible for educational institutions to resist proprietary sponsorship in exchange for Web exposure?
Obviously distance educators can provide both local course material and remote information from other WWW sites. Administratively, it becomes questionable whether a learner is taking the course at the original institution or at the hyperlinked sites. The reverse is the situation where an academic refuses to share course material in this manner, claiming that their work needs to be distributed in a controlled fashion. This practice highlights not only copyright/intellectual property issues but also brings into question the students' own identity as belonging to the home institution or otherwise. If there are disparities in fee structures, then students might just as easily shop around for the cheapest course, since the course content references the same pool of URL's.
A final problem concerns fear. One of us had a recent conversation with a professor who would not entertain the idea of placing any course material on the WWW. To him, the very placement of information "for the free use by others" would destroy him as a professional. To this professor, the publishing of books, which are then required reading in his many courses represented substantial additional income. To put this information on the WWW would mean, to him, the demise of him as a professional.
Despite claims otherwise, the WWW represents a primarily teacher-centred environment. We have millions of home pages whose links therein have been determined primarily by the Webmaster, or in the case of distance education, the instructor. Where is the student interaction, or even the sense of community usually engendered by collegial life, and so important to students' identity, independence and motivation?
The WWW is dissimilar to other Internet applications insofar as it is only primitively interactive. Besides clicking on a hyperlink and filling out an electronic form, users largely cannot interact with the Web. Nor can WWW users easily "see" each other on the Web. In order to truly interact with the current WWW, a home page peruser has to become a home page producer. There is some hope however. New initiatives in Web-based computer conferencing (HyperNews), Web chat systems, and Virtual Reality add-ons are under way. Time will tell if these new programs will find acceptance or be truly useful to improving the WWW.
The ease of the Web also promotes an analogous feeling about the Web content: if it is easy to find the information, then it must be ordinary information. In academia, students are rewarded for finding rare or atypical references. And if clicking can bring up wholly different sets of information, then the content may be similarly digested by scanning and browsing as opposed to close reading; printing is eschewed in favour of online assimilation. In fact the very nature of hypertext/hypermedia mitigates against perusal in any other form except WWW format.
Thus course material which may be attributed to be of dubious value may not be accessed at any other time except online. Given present costs of online usage, the normal process of reading and questioning may be reduced to mere minutes. A possible solution would be to use software which collects all the hyperlinks of a home page and delivers this to the student for local consumption on the local hard drive. Local electronic mail programs do exactly this with Unix mailboxes.
Educationally, some commentators have decried that the Web is growing too fast. The sheer ease of changing a Web page leads to the question of confidence in Web resources. Books, once printed, may be referenced and checked time and time again. But Web pages by their very nature are ephemeral and changeable. How many past Internet documents and programs no longer exist in their original form? Can academics and professionals actually trust Web references if they may disappear overnight?
The perennial problem for most WWW sites is a constant craving for more bandwidth. A potential criticism is that "surfing" the WWW with a graphical browser uses up too much bandwidth. The fancy fonts and pictures may be perceived to be totally unnecessary to the collection of information. Thus, the graphical front-ends to the WWW are too costly and are attracting the wrong type of user to the WWW. Are we creating a generation of click-on-demand Internet users in the same way as the television watcher who scans 200 channels with a remote control only to find there is nothing worth watching? Are we turning into Web couch potatoes bemusedly browsing 6 million Web channels?
Most instructors would not appreciate the idea that their Web pages were being scanned as a television watcher skims channels, but this certainly is what is occurring. Home pages placed on the WWW mean that millions of people can flip through the information. Unless a home page is accessed via a password (presumably given to learners after they have "registered" for the course), it becomes a freebie on the world's largest database.
A final issue for distance learning concerns security, privacy and authenticity. At the time of writing this paper the use of the WWW is notoriously non-secure. Any WWW user may anonymously access almost any home page on the Web. Using any Internet application, including WWW forms to transmit personal details is a risk. This is certainly problematic for commercial transactions but it also has implications for distance learning.
It is necessary for WWW distance learners to feel confident that their learning environment is a protected one. If the course coordinator asks for discussion, either by WWW forms or even WWW computer conference, then students must feel secure that outsiders will not be able to access their ideas and private conversations. Student personal Web servers need the same level of protection. This is essential in the case of fee-paying courses whose students would not appreciate their course material being available to the rest of the world. Such access undervalues the course and introduces a spate of legal problems. A hypothetical example might include the student who claims to have completed the course through accessing a home page and its links, but has not actually paid for the course. The solution is to protect the WWW home page with either a course password or individual passwords.
Theory and the WWW
From perusal of the WWW, we have come to the conclusion that most WWW home pages would appear to have been designed from imitation or trial and error. The latest developments such as the Netscape enhancements seem to be the focus of much experimental work. Design professionals have only some experience with screens, and computer programmers have little training in design. Authors appear to have clumped information together in any order, with any number of links, and with a myriad of purposes in mind. While online style sheets do exist and HTML books are helpful, most webmasters proceed with little attention to theory.So here we proffer three theories to guide the development and use of WWW home pages for use in distance education: cognitive flexibility theory, dramaturgical theory, and social theory.
Cognitive Flexibility Theory (CFT) is a case-based theory of learning originally proposed as a way to help advanced students acquire complex knowledge from ill-structured domains (Spiro et al., 1992; Spiro & Jehng, 1990). According to this theory, advanced learning requires the development of multiple and flexible representations of knowledge. Jonassen, Ambruso & Olesen (1992) in describing a hypertext program on transfusion medicine give four principles of hypertext and CFT which are relevant to the design of hypermedia systems. The four principles are illustrated in TABLE 1; each component is followed by instructor examples for WWW practice for a course in Document Design.
TABLE 1: ========================================================================= 1. Learning activities must provide multiple representations of content. Design the home page to include a wide range of examples represented through text, graphics, and video. For example a course a home page might include video clips from industry professionals, or it might include numerous graphics illustrating practical points of document design. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2. Instructional materials should avoid oversimplifying the content domain and support context-dependent knowledge. For the Document Design home page, the instructor could link the discussion to a series of articles illustrating how the field has changed over time (e.g., early articles on audience analysis stressed readability formulas; later ones debunk the use of these formulas). ------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3. Instruction should be case-based and emphasise knowledge construction, not transmission of information. Here the instructor again could follow one document through the different levels of understanding, providing links to specific parts of documents that represent each concept (e.g., under copyright law, links could indicate places where copyright was addressed as well as other WWW sites in which ethical uses of information are discussed). ------------------------------------------------------------------------- 4. Knowledge sources should be highly interconnected rather than compartmentalized. Using the WWW itself encourages the interconnecting of other sites which have relevance to the course on Document Design. The instructor may also allow students to link their own pages and interesting finds to the course home page. =========================================================================
Although we have discussed how teachers of Technical Communication might use Cognitive Flexibility Theory's principles when designing a home page, this theory does not address how learners actually interact with the information. Although the presence of multiple paths and links would appear to support active learning, the home page is still largely controlled by the instructor as designer. We need to move beyond the home page as a mass linkage of concepts and case examples to home page as a stage, as interaction, as promoter of emotional involvement on the part of the learner. To do so, we need to examine dramaturgical theory.
A dramaturgical view of the WWW values engagement over information. The multimedia (and multi-sensory) WWW has the capacity to engage learners emotionally, as well as intellectually. Thus the beginning of a Web page should elicit an emotional response, a reason to continue. Brenda Laurel (1991) first proposed a dramaturgical view toward computer-based interaction; dramatic ideas and techniques can be used to influence the way computers (and thus the WWW) feel to learners who take part in them. From a dramaturgical perspective, the Web is about creating imaginary worlds that have a special relationship to reality, worlds in which we can extend, amplify, and enrich our students' capacities to think, feel, and act (p.33).
If we adopt this dramatic perspective, two things are possible in a representational world: first, the playwright's carefully crafted script leads to stimulation, imagination, and emotion in the audience; second, when the action is complete and the plot has been successfully constructed, the audience is satisfied by the closure. The construction of plots essentially provides emotional and intellectual satisfaction. Although we immediately see the value of intellectual satisfaction in our design of WWW home pages, we often forget the equal importance of emotional satisfaction. Is a carefully constructed and cognitively flexible home page automatically emotionally satisfying? We have our doubts. Learners need emotional stimulation within the representational world of the WWW.
In Table 2, we use Brenda Laurel's (1991) contemporary version of the shape of dramatic action to describe the context of a hypothetical learner's interaction with a WWW home page.
TABLE 2:
========================================================================
The shape of dramatic action The shape of WWW action
========================================================================
a. Exposition - a. Opening heading or banner
The part of a play that functions The top or beginning of a WWW
to reveal the context for the home page. Its function is to
unfolding action. It formulates reveal the tenor or context of
potential into possibilities, the unfolding page. Upon seeing
introduces characters, the opening banner, a learner
environments, and situations. forms ideas regarding the
applicability of this home page
to his/her goals.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
b. Inciting incident - b. First menu / choice
A small action or event that The first menu available to the
begins what will become the learner offers a jumping off
central action of the play. point that begins what will
become his/her central action.
The learner's goals coupled with
the menu choices motivate him/her
to continue.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
c. Rising action - c. Subsequent choices
The characters pursue their The learner pursues his/her
central goals, meeting obstacles central goals, meeting obstacles
along the way. when the paths chosen don't lead
to the information being sought.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
d. Crisis - d. The pruning process
A period of heightened activity The learner follows many links,
and commitment in which many pruning away the choices based on
lines of probability are pruned whether the information presented
away. motivates him/her to continue.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
e. Climax - e. The turning point
The moment at which one of the A link proves especially
lines of probability becomes worthwhile and the learner
necessity and all others are focuses solely on the information
eliminated. This is the turning taking time to read and use it.
point of the action.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
f. Falling action - f. The bookmark
The consequences of the climax. The learner may "bookmark" the
Ambiguities tend to fall into site for future use. The journey
place. now makes some sense.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
g. Denouement - g. The journey back
The return to normalcy. Dramatic The learner either moves backward
potential is exhausted; its to the entrance to the home page,
intrinsic energy has been used up clicks on "home" to begin another
by the action. journey, or exits from the Web.
========================================================================
We know, however, that drama also include anticlimaxes. In the case of the WWW, a learner's path usually follows a winding series of anticlimaxes, resulting in some sort of frustrating experience when ambiguities do not fall into place.
Laurel elucidates the importance of surprise and reversal elements, stating that the discovery process becomes more interesting when the information found is not what the user might have expected (p.90). In the case of reversal or a surprise that reveals the opposite of what might have been expected, a learner's interest might be heightened, or a learner's path choice might be changed. To focus solely on information delivery, we risk missing the opportunity to view Web design as engagement and performance.
Of singular importance is the concept of engagement. Similar to the theatrical notion of the willing suspension of disbelief, it is "the state of mind that we must attain in order to enjoy a representation of an action" (Laurel, 1991, p. 113). In order to enjoy a play, we must temporarily suspend our knowledge that it is not real. To enjoy a game such as Doom, we must temporarily suspend our knowledge that we are not in the fortress. To enjoy the Web, learners must temporarily suspend their knowledge that they are not "really" at the host site. Engagement with the WWW is partially possible because learners can rely on the representational context; that is, whether accessed from a PC, Mac or Unix box, the WWW browsed via Netscape will look the same. The representational context remains constant, and thus, learners are free to navigate, explore, and engage with the information. Multimedia representations should in turn motivate learners to continue to engage and explore.
Thus, dramaturgical theory allows us to see the Web as more than information delivery. The Web (indeed all computer applications) are a stage in which learners enter, suspend belief, and interact with virtual worlds. Although it encourages learners to interact with the information this theory does not address the need to encourage learners to interact with other learners as a component of distance learning. For this, we turn to social theory.
The basic idea of social constructionist theory is that groups of people or communities, bound by shared experiences or interests, build meaning through an on-going process of communication, interpretation, and negotiation. These communities shape and determine the discourse norms of their members; facts, beliefs, and truth itself result from ongoing conversation and consensus-building (Bruffee, 1984). According to Nystrand (1990), "in this view, the community is said to inform its speaker's discourse, which reflects and instantiates the group's ideology" (p. 5). Lester Faigley (1985), who first spoke in detail about the social perspective, stated that such a perspective "forc[es] researchers to consider such issues as social roles, group purposes, communal organisation, ideology, and, finally, theories of culture" (p. 236).
WWW home pages, once developed however, do not easily support social interaction; they are not amanable to dialogue between individuals within the WWW setting because the WWW's central purpose was for information delivery. But instructors developing WWW pages should still consider the social interaction perspective as highly relevant. First, WWW home pages designed with a social interaction perspective in mind would focus on the various "moves" which achieve progressive and sequential "states" of understanding between them. For example, while one technical communication instructor may develop the first version of a WWW home page, another instructor or a student might sustain the home page by suggesting changes to the page and elaborating on these ideas through specific e-mail conversations concerning the page. This ongoing exchange thus represents a dialogic process, a communicative exchange comparable to innumerable collaborative exchanges in the technical communication workplace. Second, instructors may incorporate interactive forms and chat boxes into their modules, encouraging learners to submit their responses to the information and discuss their ideas with others.
All three theories should guide our efforts in designing home pages for distance delivery of technical communication courses. All theories also can be used to evaluate existing home pages to determine whether a page offers links from concepts to cases, provides reasons to engage with the information, and connects learners to a wider community.
Using the theory on the current WWW
Although not a distance learning course, the Advanced Computing Centre for Arts and Design, Ohio State University has a Web site (http://www.cgrg.ohio-state.edu/ACCAD.html) which seems to embody Cognitive Flexibility Theory. The first page has a picture of the building housing the Centre, which locates and defines the physical presence of the courses on offer. This first page has both photos and graphics leading to a menu on the next page down which offers text, student creations such as animations and still pictures, staff pages and current research projects.The site embodies a variety of media as one would expect from such a Centre. It also has some unexpected idiosyncrasies which give the Centre a personality unlike some cold and sterile purely information-giving sites. The staff pages have been constructed by the staff members themselves. Notable is the Director's home page which not only shows a colour jpeg of him, but also his wife and his two children. The flexibility of styles, content and formality would seem to indicate a corresponding openness to creativity and design. Inspection of student work also confirms this impression.
One of the most dramatic home pages we have found is Open Net, Education Network, Australia (http://www.opennet.net.au/). The entire first page is a photograph/image which simultaneously resembles a desert, a teepee, a building and an icon. The effect is surprising and sufficiently different to make the user click further. The drama that unfolds is entirely represented by this one perplexing image and the content of the next screen. It is a breathtakingly risky gambit on the part of this site's Webmaster, and one which we feel pays off. The page following this opening presents a simple menu with a flashing "What's New" link. There is no real plot to this home page. What we have is a one-act play encased in two short screens. Screen one is exposition, action, tension, crisis and climax; screen two resolves to normalcy, a quick denouement via menu. We find ourselves going back to the original screen for affirmation of our initial responses.
We believe that a social constructionist perspective is a somewhat alien starting point to Web design/production due the one-way nature of the extant WWW. To socially construct, one must be able to "see" fellow Web users. This is just not possible given the current state of WWW technology. From its inception the Web was primarily conceived for information delivery. It was not originally conceptualised as a means of interactive communication.
This communicative use has come about through the Internet development of the "forms" capability of Web browsers. Two new species of program are currently on the horizon: asynchronous conferencing, and Web chatting. Hypernews is a computer conferencing add-on to a Web server; and Web Chat systems such as Talker, Bianca.com, WebChat and other similar programs promise near real-time interactive discussions on the WWW.
The EnviroForum (http://www.envirolink.org/HyperNews/get/enviroforum.html) has several Hypernews computer conferences available. These include Action Alerts, Environmental Education Discussion, Forest Forum, Student Activism, and the Toxic Waste Forum. The technology is quite new and does not have the slickness of the rest of the graphical Web.
Talker is the name of an innovative Web chat environment which asks users to choose an animal, a texture or a cartoon figure to be their logo. Users "talk" to one another via Web forms with others having graphical identity as well as a textual presence. A most unusual feature is the ability to use HTML in the middle of a sentence to add interest, non-verbal emphasis, or even a hyperlinked reference to another document on the Web.
We found no site that exemplifies all three theories. The only way all three theories could be enacted at one time would be for students to become the developers, and to become developers, students need their own servers. Students would need to assemble their own interpretation of the information; students would need to become producers, directors, and mentors along with their instructors. Distance learning traditionally has focused on what the instructor and the institution can offer students. Distance learning in the future will focus on fewer institutions but more learners, fewer instructors but more mentors, fewer concrete resources but more virtual resources.
Epilogue
< The students come from all over the world. The course has a great reputation as one of the best on the CyberWeb. It was pioneered ten years ago as a simple WWW course, but has now developed into its present form utilising elements of virtual reality, video-conferencing and hypermedia. All the students are equipped with large monitors with attached cameras and 3D mice. They meet in Cyberspace once a week to discuss class issues and collaborate on class exercises. The computers can locally render realistic images of fellow students and the instructor and individuals can opt to meet in a tutorial room, a cafe or even a lounge room. Other students can be realistically visualised and interaction easily accomplished through the high-bandwidth cabled computer.Apart from the immediate access to any reference in the world, the system can assist students with their learning, intelligently adjusting itself to the student's preferred learning style. According to expectation, the instructor is still in demand, though always as a mentor and collaborator. Information delivery has evolved to a montage of student-generated images sent simultaneously to all students who are currently logged in to the evolving course. Learners mentor other learners, discussing relevant WWW sites and living within them.
References
- Brufee, K.A. (1984) "Collaborative Learning and the Conversation of
Mankind," College English, 46, 1984, pp. 635-52.
- Faigley, L. (1985) "Competing theories of process: A critique and proposal". In L. Odell and D. Goswami (eds), Writing in Nonacademic Settings, pp. 231-48, NY: Guildford Press.
- Jonassen, D., Ambruso, D. & Olesen, J. (1992) "Designing hypertext on transfusion medicine using cognitive flexibility theory," Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia, 1(3), 1992, pp. 309-322.
- Laurel, B. (1991) Computers as Theatre, Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley.
- Nystrand, M. (1990) "Sharing Words: The Effects of Readers on Developing Writers" in Written Communication, 7.1, 1990, pp. 3-24.
- Spiro, R.J., Feltovich, P.J., Jacobson, M.J., & Coulson, R.L. (1992) "Cognitive flexibility, constructivism and hypertext: Random access instruction for advanced knowledge acquisition in ill-structured domains." In T. Duffy & D. Jonassen (Eds.), Constructivism and the Technology of Instruction. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Spiro, R.J. & Jehng, J. (1990) "Cognitive flexibility and hypertext: Theory and technology for the non-linear and multidimensional traversal of complex subject matter." In D. Nix & R. Spiro (eds.), Cognition, Education, and Multimedia, Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
- Faigley, L. (1985) "Competing theories of process: A critique and proposal". In L. Odell and D. Goswami (eds), Writing in Nonacademic Settings, pp. 231-48, NY: Guildford Press.
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