ABSTRACT Cooperative Hypertext: An Educational Example

The Internet is a good opportunity to modify the teaching methods and the process of learning, and to redefine our notions of education. In this paper we present how to build a “Learning by Doing ” environment using the Internet and the hypertext development. In our approach the role of the students is active inside their learning process. We refer of our experience how supervisor in a teaching project, named Web Learning Environment (WLE), where we have studied the use of the Internet and its resources to develop a new learning environment. We have involved a classroom (sixteen students, aged 16-17) of a technical institute in Italy (specialisation in Information Technologies). The project has been divided in six different phases: the knowledge of the Internet, the research in the Internet, the access to the FTP, the didactics with the Internet, the communication using the "Net”, and the creation of a cooperative hypertext dedicated to the Bonaventura Cavalieri (an Italian mathematician). In this paper we describe some educational and cognitive aspects involved in the development of a cooperative hypertext (e.g., the work organisation, the educational and social targets, the interaction between students and teacher, the modification of the role of the teacher inside the students’ learning process)