Blazing Trails on the World-Wide Web

Abstract

Hypertext clearly has the potential to change the way students learn. However, the World-Wide Web lacks many of the features necessary for truly interactive hypertext; while hypertext pundits speak of students annotating existing pages, building new pages, and linking them into existing hypertexts, the World-Wide Web typically limits interaction to simple point-and-click browsing. At the same time, students encounter a quite different problem when they venture beyond course webs: they get "lost in hyperspace". That is, students have trouble determining where they are and where to go next. In this paper, we suggest one solution to these two problems: Blazer, a system for extending the Web with trails, named sequences of annotated pages. When a student loads a page on a trail, she sees not just the page, but also information about the trail. Trails can give students increased interactivity while grounding navigation.