hopper, 1993 [6.3, abstract, overview, toc, switchboard, references]

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.
© Mary E. Hopper | MEHopper@TheWorld.com [posted 12/04/93 | revised 04/12/13]