Nominate a web-site that you think is the "best designed" educational hypermedia site. By educational, I mean the site you nominate must have an educational purpose (not an online catalog for clothing). By hypermedia, I mean, there must be branching and links between pages. By "best designed," I mean given what you've learned about cognitive psychology in this course, what you have learned about learning in other courses, by what you've learned about hypermedia and the issues to pay attention to – which website does the best of satisfying these overall goals. Then writeup:
- Which site you chose
- Why you chose it (what makes it the "best-designed")?
- How could it be better?
I nominate “Teachers Love SMART Boards” http://smartboards.typepad.com/smartboard/ as the best educational hypermedia website I’ve encountered. Its “educational purpose” is to help teachers learn how to use this form of technology with their students.
It is set up as a blog so it is interactive, in terms of teachers being able to ask questions and receive answers. This active engagement helps to improve learning. Moreover, there are webcast videos. These tutorials provide a voice-over while the screen shot offers a demonstration with an animated cursor. This, too, helps to improve learning because the explanation goes beyond the visual mode found in print alone. There is a “frequently asked questions” section which suggests topics the reader might not ask on his/her own. This, too, supports learning theory in that a purpose for learning is established. This offering of frequently asked questions takes into account diverse learners with varying backgrounds. Also, suggesting questions helps to guide the learner toward other topics. The site is frequently updated with new information, which motivates the learner to check the site to find out new information. The information is useful, practical, relevant and meaningful to the learner (the “learner” being defined as a teacher who is using a SMARTboard). The learners are encouraged to share their questions as well as their own ideas which helps give a feeling of personal empowerment in the learning process. Opportunity for review and assimilation ("rehearsal") of information is available by having archives available. The information is quite substantive – both that which is directly given in the site and the additional information ("scaffolding") that is referenced through various links. One could easily spend huge amounts of time with this subject matter. However, one could also spend a short amount of time getting specific information that is offered. For example, a listing of “2-minute videos” is available. Also, posts are given specific subject headings, as are articles, lesson plans, etc. These subject headings would allow the learner to go directly to the specific topic of choice. Again, this is empowering for the learner because he/she is given a choice as to what he/she chooses to learn and how much time he/she wants to devote to the learning process. Also, collaborative learning is encouraged by making it very easy for the learner to share his/her ideas with others. For example, after each blog listing there is an opportunity for the learner to email that particular information to others or to add the information to a saved file or to share more information to that which was given.
The site is well-organized without extraneous distracters. On the left side of the page there is an opportunity to go on-line with questions and/or comments as well as a listing of recent forum topics. On the right side there is an organization overview with a listing of additional pages, categories, recent posts, and archives of each month from August 2007 to the present. This organization overview remains on subsequent pages, which is helpful, in terms of not getting lost! The overview is not displayed, however, if the learner clicks on one of the hyperlinks within the text to view an article, for example. Regardless, this is not a problem because it is easy to simply click on the back arrow to return to the original home page. The main text is in the middle and the length of each line is relatively short. There is adequate spacing between the columns on each side and the main text which makes for easy reading. In other words, one does not get bogged down in lengthy textual information. The contrast between the background and the text is also conducive for easy reading. What I particularly liked about this site was that the author would alternate the print color from red to blue to black, depending on the subject matter. This helped my ability for processing the subject matter by “chunking” the information. It was also helpful, in my opinion, to simply have the links underlined, rather than color-coded. In my opinion, it was more useful to have the varied text coloring be used for more appropriate attention-getting purposes, which was the subject matter. I thought it was also visually well-designed in that the text contained many screen shots, visual depictions, short videos, etc. This visual effect served to increase my interest level in the subject.
Although there is a category listing entitled “Articles” and “Lesson Plans”, perhaps the site could be improved if there was some sort of index which listed all of the articles by title or all of the lesson plans by title. In so doing, this would allow for more expedient access if a learner was looking for something in particular and did not have a lot of time to spend scrolling through topics. Also, another suggestion is that the site could perhaps have a “search” option on the home page so that the learner could type in key words to help locate the articles, lesson plans, etc.
