User centered design of hypertext and hypermedia for education

摘要

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