Hypermedia Competencies

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Hypermedia has received increasing attention since the 1980s and this has been followed by an increasing interest in utilizing hypermedia in the domain of education. Many successful projects have been reported. In most cases, students used hypermedia designed environments to search for information and to navigate from one place to another. In this approach, students use one competency namely browsing for information. This paper argues that this kind of use of hypermedia designed environment does not take advantage of hypermedia’s full potential. More competencies need to be introduced to help students better utilize and thus to benefit more from hypermedia. A framework with two dimensions, directed and focused is proposed to categorize hypermedia competencies. Combining the two dimensions, we derive four types of hypermedia competencies (a) user-directed content competencies (UC) that are navigational and entail the ability to mark/highlight important messages and allow individualization of learning (b) user-directed process competencies (UP) involving learner production/modification of hyper designed documents involving the development of new cognitive algorithms (c) designer-directed content competencies (understanding of designer directed visual clues such as pop up messages and answering of factual questions) and (d) designer-directed process in the sense of attending to advance organizers. The conclusion stresses the need to pay more attention to the instruction of these hypermedia competencies.