20% Project Reflection 4

I stumbled upon an interesting facet of my research today, and that is adaptive hypertext and hypermedia. An interesting subject! Adaptive hypermedia can be used for a variety of different things, but it has very exciting future application for an educational setting. An adaptive hypermedia technology would be able to customize what the user sees based on their knowledge, goals, abilities, needs or even interests; it would do this by providing the hyperlinks that would be most relevant to the person using the technology—"the teaching tools 'adapt' to the learner."

One of the projects that is working with this idea is the InterBook, and it looks very promising. A paper on the subject called "Web-based education for all: a tool for development adaptive courseware" gave a ton of insight both into the project, and into the idea of adaptive hypermedia itself. The authors believe hypermedia is the best option for education, because "the hypermedia interface makes it theoretically possible for each student to find his or her own unique path through the hyperspace of learning material." They also mentioned three levels necessary to reaching the ideal adaptive hypermedia teaching tool. The first level would just be making a hypermedia-based course available that had all the necessary teaching material (explanations, definitions, examples, problems, quizzes, tests, etc.). However, they say this level is not enough on its own, because there are many inexperienced students out there who are less prepared to "cope with advanced hyperspaces" that are available on web-based applications. So, the second step is where the teacher comes in. The teacher will be able to mold generic courses to fit the needs of her classroom—and to the needs of her students—by choosing which topics to learn, and the order they should be learned in. This next part is where the adaptive part of adaptive hypermedia comes in! The authors state the goal for this technology in the third step, which is a very long quote, but I think it is important enough to put here in full: "The third step is to provide adaptive guidance mechanisms specially tailored to accommodate the current knowledge, learning goals, and information seeking tasks of that individual user. Guidance in this context addresses the problem of a users' unproductive wandering, refocusing them on their learning objectives, suggesting logical next steps to inform them about the knowledge structure of the hyperspace, or re-sequencing materials according to their demonstrated knowledge of content. In these cases, the knowledge implicit in the hypermedia is well defined and carefully structured, similar to that found in a textbook."

I found the idea of adaptive hypermedia extremely intriguing, and it made me very excited for the future of technology and education! I definitely want to mention this in my final presentation, perhaps as the next step in teaching with hypermedia, or the future of teaching with hypermedia.