Literacy in a hypertext environment: constructing the meaning of navigation icons

摘要

Being literate in today's society and in the future means more than just being print-literate and able to read the written word and use print-based resources. Schools and society are increasingly demanding individuals be literate in a variety of modes visual, computer, media, audio. Often these modes are not isolated but are intertwined, interconnected and influence each other eg multimedia, mass media and electronic hypermedia [15]. Multimedia CD-ROM (compact disk - read only memory) programs are excellent examples of multimodal texts. They store information on a variety of subjects in the form of writing, pictures, video, animation and/or sound in a hypertext (Nelson, 1987) environment. This information is accessed via the computer interface using the navigation utilities of the programs, producing a non-linear text. To access the stored information students require the ability to read and understand the function of the visual and textual representations of navigation icons. This paper will report on an exploratory research about children's understandings of a range of navigational icons drawn from 2 programs -The ANIMALS! v.2.0 [12] and Infopedia [5].