Tag: hypertext

Week 5 Extension Discussion – Overview of Educational Hypermedia Research

A.M. Ternullo

Extension Discussion – Week 5 – Overview of Educational Hypermedia Research

In our guided reading, we were asked to think about researchable ideas from the Kuiper et al. (2005) article. In short summary, the article explores the new-in-2005 concerns about K-12 students being able to use the Internet in their learning and whether the Internet requires specific skill of students. In 2023, these questions are still relevant.

In the article, Kuiper et al. (2005) make reference to a research study where students were being taught explicitly that when they click on a hyperlink, they also need to interact with it deeply. In 2023, in the college setting where I teach, the assumption is that kids are going to come into the classroom with a fully formed understanding of how to interact with the Internet. The myth of the digital native, coined by Prensky (2001) persists in higher education to the detriment of learners and teachers. Prenksy’s theory was that those who grew up with technology – digital natives– would have an innate sense of how use technology, unlike digital immigrants, who came to technology later. The assumption carries over to educational spaces where it can be easy to assume that just because students grew up with technology, they will automatically know how to apply that technology to a variety of learning contexts. An innate skill to apply technology to learning does not exist.

Enyon (2020) explored the harm of the persistent nature of the digital native myth. The myth itself presents a generational divide (which Enyon notes, the literature does not support) and leads to a very hands-off approach in adults teaching children to use technology. Now, this may be different as so-called elder millennials, the original digital natives per Prensky’s theory, are taking spaces as educators in classrooms. Millennials were assumed to be native to technology because it was ubiquitous as they grew. As an elder millennial, I know that I had to learn technology and how to apply it on my own. There was no one to teach me because the divide Enyon pointed out was ever-present in my educational experiences. I had no guidance when it came to encountering hypertext for the first time, for example. The closest I ever got to “online training” was in grad school when a research librarian taught us Boolean searches in the time before Google was ubiquitous and natural language searches were a thing.

The research opportunities in this area come from looking at how learner relationship to technology is established, nurtured, and supported. The skills an Internet user needed in 2005 are also vastly different from the skills an Internet user needs in 2023.

The Web has become a different place. In the early days of the Internet, people in general were leery of it. I remember being explicitly told by high school English teachers and college professors that I could not trust everything I found online. But in 2023, “the Internet” has become an all-encompassing resource. “I read it online” becomes the only needed – or maybe even differently in 2023, “I saw it on TikTok.”  It seems that the old traditions of authorial authority (from the days of publishing when author work had to be vetted for credibility among other things before it was published) has transplanted online. If it’s published online, it must be credible, right? I see this a lot with Internet users who don’t understand that the vetting process for publishing online is to hit “submit” on a website. There are no more checks and balances. The Internet democratizes access to information, and it also allows anyone with Internet access to become a content creator. Search engine algorithms have also become very siloed. People get return results based on what they like to see, which means they confront ideas less and less that challenge their worldviews (Pariser, 2011) Not to mention the dawn of Chat GPT, which manufactures source information to appear credible and returns results based on user inputs.

Students today need to be trained to be critical of information and resources they encounter online. The Internet is a great repository of information, but not all information is created equal, or should be held as having the same value or veracity. The notion that students need specific skills still holds true and is still an area of valid research. This is an area of research I am personally very interested in.  

References

Kuiper, E., Volman, M., & Terwel, J. (2005). The web as an information resource in k–12 education: Strategies for supporting students in searching and processing information. Review of Educational Research, 75(3), 285-328. https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543075003285

Eynon, R. (2020).  “The myth of the digital native: Why it persists and the harm it inflicts”, in Burns, T. and F. Gottschalk (eds.), Education in the Digital Age: Healthy and Happy Children, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/2dac420b-en.

Pariser, E. (2011). The filter bubble: What the Internet is hiding from you. penguin UK.

Prensky, M. (2001). Digital natives, digital immigrants, part 1. On the Horizon, 9(5), 1-6. https://doi.org/10.1108/10748120110424816

Week 5 Annotation 1 – Learning from hypertext: Research issues and findings

A.M. Ternullo

Shapiro, A., & Niederhauser, D. (2004). Learning from hypertext: Research issues and findings. In D. H. Jonassen (Ed), Handbook of Research for Educational Communications and Technology (pp. 605-620). New York: Macmillan.

               Shapiro et al. (2004) provide an overview of research issues in hypertext assisted learning (HAL). The overview of research includes the theoretical underpinnings, the practical matters of reading and learning from hypertext, including metacognitive processes and the role of conceptual structure of hypertexts in relationship to human memory construction. A lot of space is devoted to providing an overview of the effect of system structures on learning. Learning structures are discussed in terms of information structures that function in a hierarchy -lets the reader go back and forth between the original text and more information – versus the unstructured hypertext structures that rely on user choice to help in creating meaning. Well-defined structures are best for learners when they have little or no prior knowledge on a subject. Ill-defined structures are better for learners who have more prior knowledge on a subject; however, just because a student is advanced does not mean they will automatically apply themselves to learning in an unstructured hypertext learning task. Learner variables are also discussed as related to the effectiveness of HAL; students who have more prior knowledge can engage at a higher level with HAL. The reading patterns of the learner also impact success with HAL; the purpose of reading influences how students interact with the text. For example, if students have a very specific goal for reading, they will make better connections with and between the material than those reading without scope. The HAL research is also problematic because there is not a unifying theoretical underpinning to this field of study, no coherence in methodological approach, lack of a precise language for discussing HAL. The lack of published research on the topic makes it hard to see HAL as a powerful learning tool and more research needs to be done.

            Shapiro et al. present a very cohesive and well catalogued literature review of HAL research. The headers and sub headers make it very clear and easy to follow the connections from the research to their own assertions about the state of the field of HAL research. Additionally, each heading has its own conclusion which neatly and succinctly ties the literature reviewed together. This makes it very easy to see the way the conclusions were drawn from the literature. The critiques made of the lack of cohesiveness are shown to the readers of this article and all ideas expressed are very concrete and connected to specific studies that had been conducted up until that point. I would also argue that this piece brings some of the cohesiveness to the field of study of HAL that Shapiro et al. say the field is lacking. By drawing these specific pieces of literature under the umbrella of this literature review, they are pulling together the early studies that are the seeds of the field of research into HAL.  

            As a doctoral student, I find this article compelling on two fronts. First, I see this as a model/exemplar of how to construct a literature review that supports making claims and assertions on a topic. It is also a very great example of how to pull from the literature to locate and discuss gaps to pinpoint where a valuable research question may be lying in wait for a researcher to expand on the topic. I also find this notion of trying to pull a field together interesting. Shapiro et al. see that there is an emerging field on HAL based on hypertexts and the uses in practice that emerge from the literature – but pulling it all together so the field has value is a significant task. Someone has to be the one to ask these questions. I’ve read a lot of educational scholarship, and it’s the first time I have come across a call like this from the field. And having done research on this topic in the last 5 years, I see there is more scholarship on the topic, but I’m not sure if it’s any more cohesive than what was described in this article as it hadn’t occurred to me to pay attention to that kind of organization across a field before this article.