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Most traditional navigational design techniques do not provide a good mechanism for dealing with the complexity of the navigational path of multimedia hypertext (or hypermedia) systems, such as a multimedia page on the Web. When the number of pages (or nodes) of the hypermedia system grows, the links among these pages increase factorially. This makes the navigation structure diagram of a small 20‐page Web site almost impossible to read, maintain, expand and reuse. In addition, most of these techniques do not provide formal instruction, or a step‐by‐step guideline, for users to support their development of hypermedia systems. This paper, therefore, aims to introduce, step‐by‐step, a new graph‐based navigational design technique, the Navigational Graph, together with a new set of notation. It provides systems developers to visualise and manipulate the navigational structures of Web sites. This technique improves the reusability, maintainability, decomposability, readability and expandability of the development of Web sites in terms of navigational design. This paper also attempts to address the problem of lack of guidelines for users to design and document their Web sites.

This paper suggests a standard format for creating hypermedia software. Teachers and students of literature have taken up the use of hypermedia technology enthusiastically and so we are rapidly arriving at a situation where a mushrooming of software for language and literature teaching will be faced. We will arrive much sooner at a situation where searching for an appropriate software would be as difficult as finding an appropriate article today. Technology is expected to optimise information to maximise knowledge: the confusion created by Gutenburg's invention is because duplication cannot be avoided. The suggested format is based on the major pillars of literary criticism — author centred, text centred and reader centred—and develops from the word to the work level. The findings have been demonstrated in the form of Technocriticism, a hypermedia program created on HyperCard.

The purpose of this paper is to present the development of a system called Structured Hypermedia Algorithm Explanation (SHALEX), as a remedy for the limitations existing within the current traditional algorithm animation (AA) systems. SHALEX provides several novel features, such as use of invariants, reflection of the high‐level structure of an algorithm rather than low‐level steps, and support for programming the algorithm in any procedural or object‐oriented programming language.

By defining the structure of an algorithm as a directed graph of abstractions, algorithms may be studied top‐down, bottom‐up, or using a mix of the two. In addition, SHALEX includes a learner model to provide spatial links, and to support evaluations and adaptations.

Evaluations of traditional AA systems designed to teach algorithms in higher education or in professional training show that such systems have not achieved many expectations of their developers. One reason for this failure is the lack of stimulating learning environments which support the learning process by providing features such as multiple levels of abstraction, support for hypermedia, and learner‐adapted visualizations. SHALEX supports these environments, and in addition provides persistent storage that can be used to analyze students' performance. In particular, this storage can be used to represent a student model that supports adaptive system behavior.

SHALEX is being implemented and tested by the authors and a group of students. The tests performed so far have shown that SHALEX is a very useful tool. In the future additional quantitative evaluation is planned to compare SHALEX with other AA systems and/or the concept keyboard approach.

SHALEX has been implemented as a web‐based application using the client‐server architecture. Therefore students can use SHALEX to learn algorithms both through distance education and in the classroom setting.

This paper presents a novel algorithm explanation system for users who wish to learn algorithms.

In this paper, we review the literature on learner control and discuss the implications that increased control may have for training in e-learning environments. The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive review of the learner control literature, focusing on adults and workplace training. We begin by reviewing the literature on learner control, focusing on the positive and negative effects associated with providing adult learners with control in e-learning environments. We organize our review into instructional design factors that have been manipulated to provide learners with control and person issues that moderate the relation between learner control and outcomes. Then, we summarize developments in training research and in adult learning that relate to learner control in order to provide a theoretical context for understanding learner control in adult workplace e-learning.

The purpose of this paper is to review the use of adaptive systems in education. It is intended to be a useful introduction for the non-specialist reader.

A distinction is made between intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) and adaptive hypermedia systems (AHSs). The two kinds of system are defined, compared and contrasted. Examples of the implementation of the two kinds of system are included.

Similarities and differences between the two kinds of system are highlighted. A conceptual unification is proposed based on the architecture of Course Assembly System and Tutorial Environment, a seminal prototype learning environment developed by Pask and Scott in the 1970s as an application of Pask’s conversation theory.

The architecture shows how the key aspects of ITSs and AHSs can be combined to complement each other. It is intended to be an original contribution that is of particular interest for the specialist reader.

The paper, aims to introduce an educational content management system Hypermedia Learning Objects System (hylOs), which is fully compliant to the IEEE LOM eLearning object metadata standard. Enabled through an advanced authoring toolset, hylOs allows the definition of instructional overlays of a given eLearning object mesh.

In educational content management, simple file distribution is considered insufficient. Instead, IEEE LOM standardised eLearning objects have been well established as the basic building blocks for educational online content. They are nicely suited for self‐explorative learning approaches within adaptive hypermedia applications. Even though eLearning objects typically reside within content repositories, they may propagate metadata relations beyond repository limits. Given the explicit meaning of these interobject references, a semantic net of content strings can be knotted, overlaying the repository infrastructure.

Based on a newly introduced ontological evaluation layer, meaningful overlay relations between knowledge objects are shown to derive autonomously. A technology framework to extend the resulting semantic nets beyond repository limits is also presented.

This paper provides proof of concept for the derivation and use of semantic content networks in educational hypermedia. It thereby opens up new directions for future eLearning technologies and pedagogical adoption.

The paper illustrates capabilities of the hylOs eLearning content management. The hylOs is built upon the more general Media Information Repository (MIR) and the MIR Adaptive Context Linking Environment (MIRaCLE): its linking extension. MIR is an open system supporting the standard XML, CORBA and JNDI. hylOs benefits from manageable information structures, sophisticated access logic and high‐level authoring tools like the eLO editor responsible for the semi‐manual creation of meta data and WYSIWYG like XML–content editing, allowing for rapid distributed content development.

Over the last few years, networking technologies and distributed information systems have moved up the OSI layer and are established well within application‐centric middleware. Most recently, content overlay networks have matured, incorporating the semantics of data files into their self‐organisational structure with the aim of optimising data‐centric distributed indexing and retrieval. This paper elaborates a corresponding concept of semantic structuring for educational content objects. It introduces and analyses the autonomous generation and educational exploitation of semantic content nets, providing proof of concept by a full‐featured implementation within the hylOs educational content management system.

The subject of a recent MA thesis in Library and Information Studies is the development of a prototype scholars workstation for presentation of materials, in a hypermedia format, from the Dickens House Museum Library, London. Type and number of materials is provided. Basic hypertext features and authoring attributes of the hypermedia software used, Guide 3.0 for Windows, are described and the time factors inherent in research, planning and development of such a project are emphasized. Elements of screen design are described and presentation of textual and visual materials are provided with accompanying illustrations of navigational pathways. Testing of the prototype is described, including the test sample, the questionnaire and evaluation form, and brief conclusions.

This chapter examines the role that video has played since its introduction to teacher education in the 1960s. The chapter first reviews several leading innovations that have been popular across the last forty years. I then argue that in the past, teacher education has not always capitalized on the features of video that make it particularly useful for teachers. To address this issue, I introduce three affordances of video that should be considered when designing video-based activities for teachers. To conclude, I point to several programs that leverage these affordances and that I recommend we investigate for the future.

Social navigation is an emerging trend for navigation in hypermedia. With social navigation, users can be guided through large volumes of learning content by cues which integrate the browsing history of past users. Earlier papers have shown that social navigation is suitable for navigation not only in classic hypermedia but also in time‐based learning media like web lectures by presenting prototype implementations. The purpose of this paper is to report on user experiences with social navigation for web lectures in the classroom.

This paper presents results obtained from a two‐term classroom study with a social navigation interface for web lectures. The study comprises both log file analysis and student questionnaires. The interface used in the study implements a footprint‐based social navigation approach for time‐based continuous media such as web lectures.

The results of the user study show that social navigation cues significantly affect user lecture navigation, causing users to pay more attention to the material previously explored by other users. The users' subjective feedback on the usefulness of the social navigation cues and related navigation components was significantly positive.

Social navigation has primarily been implemented and researched in traditional text‐ and picture‐based hypermedia. This paper presents an actual user study of footprint‐based social navigation for web lectures. The results of this study are relevant to both practitioners who want to use social navigation in web lectures and researchers who want to improve and research navigation approaches for time‐based media.