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USES
OF LINKS TO PROMOTE LEARNING (continued) Links
for student construction Currently, online course tools such as CourseInfo do not allow learners to arrange and organize links, but researchers have developed such tools to help students explore and develop relationships between information sets.The screen shots below illustrate two tools with which students can drag or move external links around into a structure that they develop on their own. |
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 The Sensemaker tool allows students to organize a set of external links into categories. As a learner explores a problem and gains a better understanding of underlying issues, new resources can be added, links can be rearranged, and new categories can be inserted. |
 The VisIT tool allows students to search for a topic, receive a visual display of "hits," then drag the best or most relevant hits into a new window. The student can attach pop-up notes to the links to annotate or describe their relative importance. |
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Research generally supports the use of tools to help students develop their own mental structure of links. Gall (1995) found the task or process for which learners engaged a hypertext database to be the critical element in defining conceptual understanding. Students given a browsing task performed the lowest, students given a searching task performed better, and students given a connecting task performed the best. The simple provision of hypermedia may aid knowing, but "...the processes used to evolve personal knowledge are as important as the structure of the knowledge itself" (Gall, 1995, p. 130). Marchionini (1988, p. 11) feels an exploratory approach with hypermedia should be followed, allowing students to learn by "connecting concepts..., forming interpretations, and synthesizing information." Mayes, Kibby, and Anderson (1990) also suggest learners will be able to map out a mental model of course concepts by struggling or working to build associations between content. |
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