The Web as Tutor: Hypertextual Teaching Aids

OF ALL THE RECENT DEVELOPMENTS in advanced computer networking, it is the World-Wide Web that has truly captured the imagination of millions of technophiles and information buffs. Since its popularization in 1993, the Web (also known as W3 and WWW) has caught on like wildfire in business, research and academia, and many users now tout it as the first real step to the creation of an "information superhighway." But for all of its profit-making and curiosity-seeking potential, the Web has largely been ignored until recently as a powerful educational tool. Scattered throughout cyberspace, one can now find powerful examples of educators, students and researchers experimenting with Web as a way to teach and to empower students with newfound creative ability. And now that over half of America's classrooms are wired to the Internet, the true potential of the Web in education can finally be explored.

What exactly does the World-Wide Web have to offer education? This article will attempt to articulate some possible answers.

From a curricular point of view, the Web can be used to design tutorials and on-line lessons for a variety of subjects. For example, Heart of Wisdom Publishing  has created a set online unit studies for home educators.  Students are introduced to topics by reading a hypertext version of the text because the coursework is built into the Web, each student may dissect the subject (and thus progress her comprehension of it) at her own rate. 

One of the most established examples of using the Web as a teaching device is Engines for Education, a hyperbook from the Institute of the Learning Sciences. Schank, one of the leading minds in artificial intelligence and education technology research, strongly believes that students should be allowed to learn according to their own interests. Instead of being forced to memorize the quadratic equation, for example, students should question how it may relate to their lives and only then come up with a good reason to learn it. His methods are rather Socratic in nature - learning must be based on questions, not on answers that are offered without due cause. See What are the Ten Mistakes in Education? for more information. 

With this logic in mind, Schank and Cleary designed Engines, a discussion of the poor state of education today and how high technology could be used to solve many of its problems. 

These categories provide the user with different angles from which to begin the hyperbook. Some users may be more interested in software development, and not the actual plight of American education; Engines lets them do that, and will only lead the discussion back into education when it fits into the context of the user's requests. Moreover, Schank and Cleary recognize an important, unavoidable fact - not every reader is going to care about every subject within a hyperbook, and others still will not have a strong enough grasp of the subject to know where to begin. For this reason, there is also an option for those who don't have a particular interest, and only wish to see something that may entertain them.

Upon entering a topic on Engines, the user is presented with an introductory paragraph, along with a comprehensive list of questions related to that paragraph. For example, the chapter on education will offer questions such as "How do students learn?," "Why are schools boring to so many kids?" and "How do computers fit into school reform?" Each question then leads to more information, which leads to more questions. All in all, there are scores of questions and answers available - and therefore thousands of different interpretations and uses of the hyperbook as a whole.

Engines for Education is an excellent example of educational Web design because the authors of the hyperbook have carefully mapped out the possible outcomes of each nugget of information offered in the text. By making a statement such as "Computers will help students learn," Schank and Cleary have attempted to come up with as many conceivable questions as possible that might be raised from such a statement. And each answer to these questions will lead to more questions, and undoubtedly some of these will then connect directly with other subtopics within the book. In the end, a successful Web book such as Engines must crafted with sometimes thousands of links and hundreds of pages. Yet with the proliferation of automatic HTML authoring programs, such linkages will no longer seem as daunting a task as this example might suggest. And to make hyperbook design even simpler, programmers at the Institute are working on what are known as ASK systems - automatic, intelligent computer programs which will analyze a document's content with inquisitive search agents in order to help formulate questions that might be raised by that content

In sum, the World-Wide Web provides an excellent tool in which to design on-line curricula. With the World-Wide Web, anyone could transform a topic of choice into a living, breathing document that would be more than just useful and educational to students - it would also be fun.