6.3.4 Impact of the Technical Contexts on Advanced Courseware
[Refer to Technical Characteristics column in Table 6.1.]
Participants in this study needed to maintain an awareness of a multitude of
technical issues to provide a reasonable foundation upon which to base decisions
and activities. The technical choices of a project were ideally made based upon
the characteristics of the technology that would best support the educational
goals at hand, but other factors also played important roles. The issue of how
well the software supported both the creation of courseware, and the interaction
of users afterwards became a major consideration at the time that the functionality
of the software was chosen, or during the early phases of the project. Finally,
every courseware project in this study needed to find ways to provide for
courseware to be adaptable. These issues will probably be important for the
foreseeable future and successfully balancing them with the educational issues
at hand will continue to take a great deal of effort and forethought by those
most closely associated with the projects.
Over the years, efforts have been made to define hypermedia by what it is.
Perhaps in the future a better approach would be to define it by what it should be,
which is the ultimate in human computer interaction. "In some ways, the people
who first described hypertext - Bush, Englebart, Nelson- all had the same vision
of hypertext as a path to ultimate human-computer interaction, a vision which is
still alive today among hypertext researchers."
(Conklin, 1987, p. 20).
Hypermedia would then be defined as the point at which technical limits
are overcome, so that authors become free to deal with more abstract
issues and "escape from the focus on the issues of design which are primarily
economic and primarily physical, into the focus on design issues which are
primarily logical and organizational in terms of what is coherent
(Lawler & Hopper, 1992, Passage 2)."
Using this definition, Hypermedia would include the multiple integrated functions
required to provide flexible support for broad educational goals. In addition,
it would include the attributes that make software usable and adaptable for
availability and change in distributed computing environments.