This study identifies two distinct conceptualizations of interactivity in the communication literature—the functional view and the contingency view. Although the functional view has predominated academic research on interactivity, this study operationalizes the contingency view in the context of an experiment designed to investigate the impression formation effects of interactivity in Web-based mass communication. A third of the participants in a between-participants experiment (N=60) were exposed to the lowinteractivity version (no hyperlinks) of a political candidate’s Web site, another third to the medium-interactivity version (a single layer of related links), and the remaining third to the high-interactivity version (two hierarchical layers of related links). The results indicate that the level of Web site interactivity influenced participants’ perceptions of the candidate as well as their levels of agreement with his policy positions. Implications for conceptual development of interactivity are disc...

Explicating Web Site Interactivity: Impression Formation Effects in Political Campaign Sites

Contributors

Indigo Esmonde, University of Toronto; Krishna Madhavan, Purdue University; Wolff-Michael Roth, University of Victoria; Dan L. Schwartz and Jessica Tsang, Stanford University; Estrid Sorensen, Humboldt University and Aarhus University; Iris Tabak, Ben Gurion University of the Negev



Background

The field of engineering education research has seen substantial growth in the last five years but it often lacks theoretical and empirical work on engineering learning that could be supplied by the learning sciences. In addition, the learning sciences have focused very little on engineering learning to date.



Purpose

This article summarizes prior work in the learning sciences and discusses one perspective—situative learning— in depth. Situativity refers to the central role of context, including the physical and social aspects of the environment, on learning. Furthermore, it emphasizes the socially and culturally negotiated nature of thought and action of persons in interaction. The aim of the article is to provide a foundation for future work on engineering learning and to suggest ways in which the learning sciences and engineering education research communities might work to their mutual benefit.



Scope/Method

The article begins with a brief discussion of recent developments in engineering education research. After an initial overview of the field of learning sciences, situative learning is discussed and three analytical aspects of the perspective are outlined: social and material context, activities and interactions, and participation and identity. Relevant expert commentaries are interspersed throughout the article. The article concludes with an exploration of the potential for contributions from the learning sciences to understanding engineering learning.



Conclusion

There are many areas of mutual benefit for engineering education and the learning sciences and many potential areas of collaborative research that can contribute not only to engineering learning but to the learning sciences.

Situated Engineering Learning: Bridging Engineering Education Research and the Learning Sciences

Little is known about the specific kinds of questions programmers ask when evolving a code base and how well existing tools support those questions. To better support the activity of programming, answers are needed to three broad research questions: 1) What does a programmer need to know about a code base when evolving a software system? 2) How does a programmer go about finding that information? 3) How well do existing tools support programmers in answering those questions? We undertook two qualitative studies of programmers performing change tasks to provide answers to these questions. In this paper, we report on an analysis of the data from these two user studies. This paper makes three key contributions. The first contribution is a catalog of 44 types of questions programmers ask during software evolution tasks. The second contribution is a description of the observed behavior around answering those questions. The third contribution is a description of how existing deployed and proposed tools do, and do not, support answering programmers' questions.

/pdf/asking-and-answering-questions-during-a-programming-change-21o3wehtmb.pdf

Asking and Answering Questions during a Programming Change Task

Over the past decade, design experimentation has become an increasingly accepted mode of research appropriate for the theoretical and empirical study of learning amidst complex educational interventions as they are enacted in everyday settings. There is still a significant lack of clarity surrounding methodological and epistemological features of this body of work. In fact, there is a broad variety of theory being developed in this mode of research. In contrast to recent efforts to seek a singular definition for design experimentation, I argue that methodological and epistemological issues are significantly more tractable if considered from the perspective of manifold families of theoretically framed design-based research. After characterizing a range of such families, I suggest that, as we deliberate on the nature of design-based research, greater attention should be given to the pluralistic nature of learning theory, to the relation between theory and method, and to working across theoretical and method...

https://faculty.washington.edu/pbell/EPDBR_Bell.pdf

On the Theoretical Breadth of Design-Based Research in Education

The Internet opens a new generation of distance education (fourth generation), introducing sophisticated delivery tools and creating a paradigm shift with profound implications on the design of distance education courses. In order to accommodate this medium, novel curriculum design and learning models may be appropriate. In this paper, there are several instructional design models presented and a hybrid model is developed. This model integrates both constructivist and objectivist approaches to instructional design. When creating or redesigning courses for Internet distribution, content and media developers, faculty and researchers benefit from the identification of a developmental model taking into account both learning and design principles. # 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

A developmental model for distance learning using the Internet

hypermedia, it is necessary to distinguish between two kinds of applications: “One encourages those who wish to wander through large clouds of information, gathering knowledge along the way. The other is more directly tied to specific problem-solving, and is quite structured and perhaps even constrained” [20, p. 119]. Applications of the first type appear as browsable databases—or hyperbases—that can be freely explored by a reader. In contrast, applications of the second type take the shape of electronic documents—or hyperdocuments—that intentionally guide readers through an information space, controlling their exploration along the lines of a predefined structure. Each type has its particular advantages and encourages different reading strategies. While the first one is better suited to support unconstrained search and information retrieval, the second one is more adequate for tasks requiring deep understanding and learning. As Hammond points out, it “may be fun and perhaps instructive, to open every door and peer inside, but there are many situations where learning is most effective when the freedom of the learner is restricted to a relevant and helpful subset of activities.” It is this second type of task—reading a hyperdocument for learning—that we address in our discussion of “designing for comprehension.”

Hypermedia and cognition: designing for comprehension

Hypermedia and cognition: designing for comprehension : Designing hypermedia applications

Die faszinierende Grundidee von Hypertext besteht nach Conklin (1987) darin, das gedankliche Einheiten und ihre assoziativen Verknupfungen zu diskreten, manipulierbaren Bildschirmobjekten korrespondieren. Durch Erzeugung und Veranderung derartiger Objekte kann Wissen in einer nichtlinearen Organisationsform dargestellt und erworben werden (“non-linear writing and reading”). Der innovative Gehalt dieser Idee liegt darin, das sie dem Nutzer einen sehr viel aktiveren und flexibleren Umgang mit Informationen gestattet, als dies bislang ublich war. Es ist daher nicht uberraschend, das das Hypertextkonzept von Anfang an auch eine starke Faszination auf den Lehr- und Lernbereich ausgeubt hat und zwar besonders auf Vertreter einer konstruktivistischen Konzeption, die Lernen nicht als passive Wissensaufnahme, sondern als aktiven Aufbau einer koharenten Wissensstruktur begreifen. Vor diesem Hintergrund sind tradierte Konzepte des explorativen und entdeckenden Lernens neu belebt und ihre moglichen Auswirkungen auf die Ausbildung eines neuen Denkstils (“non-lineal thinking”) diskutiert worden (Beeman et al., 1987; Jonassen & Mandl, 1990).

Das Hypermedia-Autorensystem SEPIA

The development, distribution, quality assurance and maintenance of software products increasingly takes place in international markets and requires the intensive collaboration of several parties. To facilitate the different kinds of asynchronous and synchronous collaboration between remote users in different European countries hypermedia-based telecooperation support is a key component: Hypermedia enables the integration of heterogeneous information entities created by different partners as well as the structuring of such a multi-organizational knowledge base. Telecooperation technology enables not only asynchronous sharing of distributed knowledge but also tightly-coupled collaboration on synchronously shared workspaces. These facilities can be used to support communication and cooperation in the later stages of the software lifecycle, especially the market introduction of commercial software products.

Manfred Thüring

Papers

Hypermedia and cognition: designing for comprehension

Hypermedia and cognition: designing for comprehension : Designing hypermedia applications

Das Hypermedia-Autorensystem SEPIA

Hypermedia-based Telecooperation Support for Marketing Software Products