Hypermedia in education: Children as audience or authors

ABSTRACT When teachers reflect on their teaching, their most lasting memories are when students have struggled with knowledge and constructed their own understandings, discovered relationships, and articulated original ideas – original, at least, in the child’s perspective. Teachers want students to build a relationship with information, to analyse and critique others ’ ideas and then invent and develop their own understandings. Teachers want students to experience the joy of discovery and the pride of creativity. Our experience and that of other researchers and classroom teachers has shown that using hypermedia authoring tools in the classroom can be a powerful stimulus for students to engage in this type of learning. What is Hypermedia? Hypermedia refers to a unique kind of software environment that combines the characteristics of both hypertext and multimedia. The term multimedia has been around a long time, long before computers, but today it is usually used to describe the integration of text, graphics, animation, sound, video and music in an interactive software environment (Turner & Land, 1994). Hypertext, a term coined by Ted Nelson in the 1960s, refers to an environment in which we can jump around electronically within large amounts of text, following tangents that reflect our interests and bypassing information we deem irrelevant. Hypermedia extends this concept to include other forms of media, such as pictures, sound, animation, and video. In print media, such as books and magazines, text and pictures are organised sequentially with one topic following another. In hypermedia, information can be organised the way most people think, by association and context. Ideas and concepts – whether represented as text, sound, or image