web·Book -
Integrating content organization, presentation and services
Werner B. Joerg
Electrical & Computer Engineering Dept.,
University of Alberta
ABSTRACT
web-Book is a content organization and course delivery product
that has been tested and refined over the past three years in University
undergraduate
course
settings. It started from an extensive set of HTML documents with embedded
navigation buttons, used in a web-supported course in Software Engineering.
It has evolved into a topic independent tool to collate, annotate and present
WWW-based documents as electronic books, complemented with a number of
interactive services supporting delivery and management of courses. The
product, in its present form, consists of a collection of Javascript enhanced
web-pages, that provide for navigation through structured course material,
and integrate a dynamic, color coded "to do" list, bibliographic references,
auxiliar reference material, linked problem/solution sets, and asynchronous
interaction facilities.
Three premises are at the root of web-Book: i) reference material used
in courses is highly structured; ii) content providers may want to incorporate
"seamlessly" their own web pages and references to other qualified WWW-documents;
iii) web-courseware does not only consist of static reference material:
it must also integrate mechanisms for announcements and facilities forsynchronous/
asynchronous interaction. In this paper we show how web-Book addresses
these premises. We report the experiences gained through successive deliveries,
from the perspectives of the students, the instructor and the developer.
To conclude we reposition web-Book within webStract,
an ambitious extension towards collaborative problem-solving and learning.
Keywords: hypermedia, learning, WWW courseware, electronic book,
web-book, navigation
BACKGROUND
web-Book is an essential step towards the realization of our vision
of
project-driven learning. The model that we envision, has emerged
from a course in Software Engineering, the delivery of which was driven
by the needs of carefully selected team projects. We aim at building a
set of computer-based tools supporting development and delivery of courses
along this vision. The model emulates the operation of a project team through
monitoring, coordination and personalized guidance of the activities of
each team member, and it maintains context dependent reference material
to direct the learning process. As a result we create an environment that
fosters individual initiative and learning through collaborative problem
solving. This implies that the course material should include means for
synchronous and asynchronous interaction, that it must offer sophisticated
document retrieval services, and that it must be accessible to the students
anytime, anywhere.
The emergence of the WWW technology on the Internet, and its successive
advances, from HTML 2 to Java, have provided an increasingly powerful tool
for the realization of our vision.
Accordingly, web-Book has evolved from an early experiment in WWW-supported
courseware in 1994/95, to a topic independent tool to collate, annotate
and present WWW-based documents as electronic books, complemented with
a number of interactive services supporting delivery and management of
courses.
web-Book is still a long way from our vision of project-driven training,
but it constitutes a central component in our ambitious (Java based) "webStract"
project which we shall introduce briefly in the conclusion.
The following summary of the evolution of our course material illustrates
the dramatic effect of the evolution of WWW technology on the level of
services, presentation and interaction available to content providers and
users.
'94-'95 edition(Intended
to be viewed with Netscape 1.1)
This version is one of the very first courses brought
to the WWW to this extent. The means available in '94 made navigation along
highly structured course material very difficult. We have tried to ease
the problem by introducing dedicated navigation buttons. Unfortunately
such buttons could only be embedded in the actual page, with the unpleasant
effect of their scrolling off the page in any decently sized document.
See how we have approached the emerging problems in a true precursor of
WWW supported courseware (see Fig. 1). Noticeable,
in particular is the distinction between absolute and relative navigation,
and the inclusion of a service section (called 'Feedback')
'95-'96 edition(Intended
to be viewed with Netscape 2.1)
In this version, frames are being used to overcome
many of the drawbacks of the earlier edition: the absolute navigation buttons
become part of a static environment and provide various access points to
the material. The relative navigation buttons are connected to the table
of contents, and allow for various navigation modes (thread, topic, direct
access - see Fig. 2). For an explanation of the concepts,
the visitor is invited to read up in the 'Help' section, in particular
'About the Table of contents' and more specifically 'About the presentation
of the Course material'. We suggest also a peek at the 'To Do' list.
'96-'97
edition (Intended to be viewed with Netscape 3.0.1)
Building and keeping track of the many links required
to implement the 'frame-ed' version of the previous year has been, politely
said - a nightmare. In this year's version we take advantage mainly of
Javascript to automate this tedious process. As a result we have implemented
a new concept - the web-Book - an interactive viewing environment
for selected and collated web-pages. This concept reaches much further
than any of the previous tools, enabling content providers to gather pages
on the WWW or locally, annotate them and collate them into 'Books'. Viewers
may navigate along the material using relative mode, topic mode or directly
through the table of contents. At any time viewers may inquire about their
position in the provided material. Means for selection of 'books', creation
and management of the tables of content, and the generation of navigation
tools are performed automatically.
The remainder of this paper is structured as follows: In the Motivation
section we discuss the need for tools facilitating knowledge acquisition,
elucidation, presentation and services. Then, under The
user's view we describe the mechanisms to access and navigate well
structured material, and to interact with peers and teacher. In the The
content provider's perspective section we elaborate on how web-Book
supports the tedious task of collecting and organizing knowledge. In the
section entitled Delivery we focus on packaging
and delivery formats, and we report experiences from the perspective of
the developer (content provider), teacher and users. Finally, under Conclusion
we share our view about where web-Book fits w.r.t. other web-tools (web-CT,
Virtual U, ...) and we provide a first glimpse into the webStract project.
MOTIVATION
The need to provide means for putting together WWW-courseware, for
presenting it in a consistent style, to provide for easy navigation
and to embedd "Services", determine the primary motivation for the current
design of web-Book. We have identified three premises to guide the design:
-
reference material used in courses is highly structured;
-
content providers may want to incorporate seamlessly their own web
pages and references to other qualified WWW-documents;
-
web-courseware does not only consist of static reference material: it must
also integrate mechanisms for announcements and facilities for synchronous/
asynchronous interaction.
We divide this section into four parts, dealing with knowledge acquisition
and organization, with knowledge presentation, with navigation, and with
integration of services respectively.
Knowledge acquisition and organization
Premise ii) suggests that support must be offered to content providers
for collecting qualified reference material on the WWW and combining or
complementing it with their own web material into a homogeneous package.
Much of this support is already available through the search and bookmarking
facilities of the most common browsers. "Bookmarks" - also called reference
pointers - consist typically of the URL of the referenced WWW-page,
its title, its date(s) when added and when last visited. We may therefore
limit the task of web-Book to accepting "bookmark-files" as an initial
layout of reference material, and to providing means for (re)organizing,
editing and structuring the reference pointers. The result of this process
is retained in a "pagelist-file", which constitutes a booklet in
web-Book terminology. We'll introduce the format of the pagelist file in
section 4.
Knowledge presentation
Knowledge presentation in this context refers both to the imposition
of structure upon the selected reference material, and to its elucidation.
Structure
Hypertext allows for linking any phrase in a document with any other
document. This may lead to a "web-like", unstructured amalgamation of documents
that is difficult to follow and that is often perceived as confusing in
learning environments: students ask for closer guidance when learning new
material. (Our observations however, indicate that "thematic" hyperlinks
are highly welcome at the time of reviewing "known" material for examinations).
We have decided to limit the use of hyperlinks to specific functions combined
under the term "structure". Structure does primarily imply a hierarchical
decomposition into topic, suptopic, etc... that can be represented by levels
of indentation in a table of contents. Structure should also accommodate
a notion of "sidebar" as an additional explanation linked to words or phrases.
In web-Book, sidebars pop up as a separate window when selected. Finally,
structure must encompass also "backward" references to material already
presented, and, to a much lesser extent also "forward" references, for
easier reviewing of material. Fig. 3 illustrates these
types of structures.We refer to the combined action of knowledge acquisition,
organization and structuring as collating. The intended result of
collating reflects in the pagelist file and may require additional commands
in the involved documents, which restricts the structuring capabilities
of imported documents (i.e. not owned by the content provider).
Elucidation
Refers to the addition of explanatory information to existing documents.
In web-Book, elucidation may take the form of an "abstract" added by the
content provider to the reference pointer of a document; it may also show
as a list of keywords relevant for a document, added to one of its reference
pointers; it may reflect in a title in a reference pointer, different from
the original title of the referenced document; the last variant of elucidation
is a personal note that a user may "attach" to any visited document.
Navigation
We distinguish three types of navigation: topic, thematic, and thread
navigation.
Topic navigation
Uses the hierarchical topic / subtopic structure. Topics can be accessed
directly (random) through a live table of contents or a subtopic list embedded
in the document. Topics can also be accessed relatively, from a given topic,
through generic "buttons". Typical buttons for relative navigation include
parent topic, first subtopic to change the level in the hierarchy;
next topic, previous topic to scan the current level.
Thematic navigation
serves a triple purpose:
-
backward linking into an earlier document, pointing to a phrase or concept,
for which the current issue represents a particular instance;
-
forward linking into a later document, pointing to a situation that exemplifies
the current argument.
-
sidebar linking to provide additional information about a current issue.
Note: the terms earlier and later, in backward and forward
linking, refer to the linear sequence induced by a table of contents; note
also that the emphasis here is on linking into documents, pointing at relevant
phrases, rather than linking to topics.
Thematic links must be embedded in the actual documents.
Thread navigation
has arisen from the concern of students possibly missing a document when
using only topic and thematic navigation. We have therefore added a "thread
forward" and "thread backward" button pair that allows students to follow
the entire reference material along the topic / subtopic hierarchy, as
layed out in the table of contents (analogous to reading a hardcopy book).
Our observations show that students are more likely to request and use
the thread navigation with new, unfamiliar material, and make more extensive
use of topic and thematic navigation when reviewing information.
No amount of sophistication for navigation however, can guarantee that
users do not "get lost". So, rather than trying to cover all possible aberrations,
we have decided to complement the navigation tools with a Where am I?
button that may be activated at any time and that highlights the position
of the current document within the table of contents.
Integration of services
To this point, web-Book is merely a sophisticated viewing tool that allows
hypertext-based access to reference material. Much of this could be achieved
with any hypertext reader accessing material distributed by a content provider
for "off-line" viewing. The only benefit gained from the connection to
the Internet, is the ability to incorporate live references to foreign
documents.
The real benefit of the WWW emerges when we combine this "static" viewing
component ("knowledge component") with a "dynamic" service component
("operational component") that allows to publish changing information,
that supports synchronous or asynchronous interaction, and that provides
controlled access to a variable pool of information. With these functionalities
we have integrated into web-Book services such as (see fig.
4) periodically updated course information, list of things to do (with
color coding of urgency and links to relevant documents or forms), variable
pool of additional course resources (e.g. bibliography - also linked into
the reference material -, links to team home pages and documents), frequently
asked question archive, discussion forums, forms for submission of questions
(to the course instructor or TAs). It must be noted that several such services
have been available on the Internet before the WWW era: WWW technology
allows to integrate them into a cohesive environment.
As we shall see under section 5. Delivery, the separation into static
and dynamic components, will prove advantageous for effective packaging
of the course material.
THE USER'S VIEW
A web-Book user is confronted with four main interfaces: the top
level for selection of services and course material; a set of service views;
a table of contents for selecting an entry point into the course material;
and a viewing window for display of the selected material and navigation.
The top level interface
Web-Book's initial window contains three frames: the "main control
panel" at the top left, the "Book cover panel" at the top right; and the
third frame, covering the remainder of the window serves as display area
for the various functions available in the top frames. The main control
panel offers services such as "Configuration", "Help" and "Guest Book".
Clicking any of these buttons displays corresponding information in the
display area. The principal role of the main control panel however, is
to show the available Books in a drop down menu. Once the user selects
a book, the corresponding cover is displayed in the "Book cover panel",
replacing the initial default cover. The book cover opens access to the
reference material, as well as to the associated services: the reference
material consists usually of a list of "booklets" (typically chapters or
sections of the "Book") and a table of services. Upon selection of a booklet,
a corresponding live table of contents is created in the display area.
In
fig. 5 we show the effect of selecting the booklet
"Introduction" in the book "CMPE 313 Software Engineering" (note that in
this case the list of booklets is matched to a "clickable image", and that
the booklet title "Introduction" is hidden under the course motto "Making
great ideas fly"). Note also that much of the help facility is built-in
by displaying, in the status line, a short description of any item pointed
at by the cursor.
If we scroll down the book cover, the table of services (as shown in
fig.
4) appears.
Service views
Clicking any of the cells of the service table brings up a corresponding
service view. For space reasons we shall focus here on the "Things to do"
service represented by the to do list window (fig. 6).
A short explanation of this window is appropriate: we have decided to provide
the course instructor with the means to classify the many things students
and teams are expected to complete during a course - in this example we
distinguish activities directly related to the classroom, activities of
the various teams, reading assignments, etc... A color coded summary of
the corresponding categories is displayed in the summary panel, reflecting
the highest urgency of any item in each category. Clicking on any category
in the summary panel brings up the details of that category, sorted in
decreasing order of urgency. Note that the items in the category panel
may contain live links to related material.
Readers are encouraged to explore other services, e.g. the "Resources"
view, in particular the selection for problem sets and suggested solutions.
The table of contents
A closer look at the table of contents (bottom part of fig.
5) reveals a number of useful properties: the header panel offers means
to alter the overall appearance of the table, e.g. the buttons to the left
allow to control the number of indentation levels to be displayed; the
buttons to the right allow to switch the presentation format between a
list and a table representation, to show or hide all the "Abstracts" and
to alternate between full and short topic index. Fig. 7
illustrates the effects of these controls. The table of contents itself
is collapsible and live, i.e. the arrow symbols can be used to expand/collapse
indentation levels, and all line items are linked to a document in the
reference material. The symbols <<A>> and <<N>>
indicate that there is an Abstract or a personal Note attached
to the corresponding document, and can be used to show or hide it. Obviously
the itemized action of these symbols overrides the overall appearance controlled
through the header panel. Another symbol, <<K>> (not visible
in the example) appears if the document has an associated list of keywords.
The viewing window
When a line item in the table of contents is selected, web-Book opens
the viewing window, which consists of three panels (Fig.
8, background window): a title panel, a viewing panel and a navigation
panel. In addition to the obvious document title and the document index,
the title panel will also display any associated abstract and list of keywords.
The navigation panel provides for topic and thread navigation (from
left to right, excluding the "?" button): parent topic, previous topic,
thread backward, thread forward, next topic, next parent topic. Note that
active buttons are highlighted, and that the status line describes the
destination, when the mouse is moved over any button. The "?" button implements
the "Where am I" function: it leads back into the table of contents and
highlights the corresponding entry. (If that entry is not visible, the
table of content is expanded accordingly). The "Add Note" button, which
is not yet fully implemented due to Javascript limitations, will allow
the readers to attach their own notes to any page (invisible to other readers)
- once such a note is attached, the button turns into "Show Note".
The viewing panel displays the content of the currently selected document;
if this document is owned by the content provider, additional web-Book
services may be embedded as shown in the front of Fig.
8: a link in the main document opens a sidebar, which itself contains
a link to the bibliography; such bibliography links may be contained also
in the main document. The full bibliography may be accessed under the "Resources"
section of "Services".
THE CONTENT PROVIDER'S PERSPECTIVE
Most of the user interface, as presented in the previous section
is generated by web-Book and does not require any intervention from the
developer, so that content providers can focus on the substance rather
than dispair over syntactic or semantic intricacies of the underlying language.
In short, the only steps the content provider needs to take are deciding
on what information to use and on how to organize it; deriving the pagelist
file for each booklet; complementing it with additional data such abstracts,
keywords and new titles, if necessary; deciding on the services to be offered
and where to be maintained; creating a book cover and entering the new
book in the booklist file. Content providers who create own documents for
inclusion in the reference material, may exploit additional features such
as sidebar, thematic links and bibliography. That's it: everything else
- presentation of the list of books and booklets, creation of the tables
of contents, labeling of the document index, navigation, access to abstracts
and keywords, hooks to services - is taken care of by web-Book. Let us
look in more detail at the content provider's tasks. (Note: for non-programmers
the following may look intimidating, but in reality much of the work can
be accomplished through slight modification of existing files or templates).
Knowledge acquisition and organization
We suggest that a WWW-browser with bookmarking capabilities be used,
to collect references (local and external) to the documents of interest.
The organization process may be more effective, if the documents are visited
in the order intended for each booklet. Once the collection process is
completed, the bookmark file must be manipulated to adjust order and indentation
of the pages, and to insert section headings for subtopics (some browsers
provide this functionality, others may require a text editor). These steps
must be repeated for every booklet (chapter).
Building the pagelist files
The bookmark files generated above are the basis for the pagelist
files, one for each. The pagelist files contain actual invocations of Javascript
methods defined in web-Book, i.e. they are external Javascript programs.
Here are the definitions of the permissible method calls:
addPage(ordered,addrLoc,dateAdded,title,addrNote)
folder(ordered,addrLoc,dateAdded,title,addrNote)
endFolder()
addAbstr(txt)
addKeyW(txt)
The first three methods are used to define the document order and indentation
in the table of contents. (Note that the folder directive, which
corresponds to a topic title, may contain a document reference too). The
translation of the bookmark file into a pagelist file can be automated
(e.g. with a Perl script): bookmarks translate into addPage, and
separators/indentation into folder / endfolder pairs. The
remaining two methods allow for the association of abstracts and keyword
lists with any document. Such entries may be made during the elucidation
process. The following excerpt shows pieces of the pagelist file pertaining
to the "Introduction" booklet shown in fig. 5.
addPage(true,"/F_motiv/baber_0.htm","","My favorite introductory story","")
addAbstr("... has been written a long time ago, or has it?")
folder(true,"/Intr.htm#top","849972888","What is Software Engineering?","")
folder(true,"","","A Need for Software Engineering","")
addAbstr( "There is more to SE than just writing programs and debugging them!")
addPage(true,"/F_need/fact.htm#top","849972950","Some facts","")
...
endFolder()
folder(true,"/pslv.htm#top","849973056","A problem-solving approach to Software Engineering","")
addPage(true,"/F_pslv/modl.htm#top","849973071","A model for problem solving","")
addPage(true,"/F_pslv/cmpl.htm#top","849973090","Handling complexity",
"/myNotes.htm#top#1")
folder(true,"/F_pslv/soln.htm#top","849973148","The Software Engineering Process","")
addPage(true,"/F_pslv/F_soln/what.htm#top","849973172","Determining the WHAT","")
...
endFolder()
endFolder()
addPage(true,"/road.htm#top","","Derivation of a Roadmap to Software Engineering","")
endFolder()
Designing the Book cover
No particular directions are to be followed for book cover design.
There are however two principal elements that should be part of the cover:
a list (or map) of the available booklets, and a collection (e.g. table)
of services. The following excerpts of the CMPE 313 book cover illustrate
the use of the various "hooks" available (in bold face; user entries italicized):
For the list of booklets:
<ul>
<li>
<a href="javascript:openBooklet('Intro','Introduction')"
onMouseOver="window.status='Click to select Booklet *Introduction*'; return true"
>Introduction</a>
<li>
...
</ul>
For the table of services:
<table border cellpadding="5" width="100%">
<tr>
<td align="center" bgcolor="ffffdd" width="33%">
<a href=
"javascript:parent.service('Org/org.htm',false)"
OnMouseOver="window.status='Display course administration menu'; return true"
OnMouseOut="window.status=''"
<Course organisation</a></td>
<td align="center" width="33%" bgcolor="ffaadd">
<a href=
"javascript:parent.toDoList()"
OnMouseOver= "window.status='Display summary of things to do'; return true"
OnMouseOut="window.status=''"
<Things to do</a></td>
...
</table>
Updating the list of books
When updating the list of books, we must decide where the static
component (reference material) and where the dynamic component (services)
of the new book are to be located. Here is for example the entry for CMPE
313:
addBook("../../Books/ce313/","CMPE 313 Softw. Eng.",
"http://www.ee.ualberta.ca/~wjoerg/wwwSupport/ce313/Services/")
This indicates that the reference material is accessible on the user's
machine and the services are maintained on the departmental server.
Adding more navigation support
In documents owned by the content provider, additional navigation
support such as sidebars, thematic references and bibliographic references
may be added, using a set of methods built into web-Book. The following
excerpts illustrate how these services can be embedded in any HTML document.
(method name in bold case; user entries italicized). Note that the omnipresent
"parent.opener.parent." leader of the method invocation
is necessary due to the hierarchy of the Javascript files in web-Book;
it guarantees that the invocations "work" with any document, at any level.
For sidebar:
<a href=
"javascript:parent.opener.parent.sideBar('xyz.htm',500,250)"
onMouseOver="window.status='Show sidebar'; return true"
onMouseOut="window.status=''"
>xyz</a>
For forward references:
<a href=
"javascript:parent.opener.parent.move(true,'title in toc')"
onMouseOver="window.status='Forward reference'; return true"
onMouseOut="window.status=''"
>forward</a>
For backward references:
<a href=
"javascript:parent.opener.parent.move(false,'title in toc')"
onMouseOver="window.status='Backward reference'; return true"
onMouseOut="window.status=''"
>backward</a>
For bibliographic references:
[<a href=
"javascript:parent.opener.parent.showLitRef('etal99')"
onMouseOver="window.status='Bibliography: show reference'; return true"
onMouseOut="window.status=''"
>etal99</a>]
To explore references outside of current booklet:
<a href=
"javascript:parent.opener.parent.explore('blabla.htm')"
onMouseOver="window.status='Click to explore'; return true"
onMouseOut="window.status=''"
>blabla</a>
Maintaining services
We have seen already how service hooks are used in the book cover.
This paragraph deals with the maintenance of services. Since services are
usually quite application specific, we shall focus only one of the generic
services: the To Do list.
The following excerpt of the list used for fig. 6
shows the entries made by the course instructor in the todo list file for
the CMPE 313 book:
addItem('class','Elaborate on the following statement:<br>'+
'"It is impossible to be definitive about a problem specification'+
' when establishing the SRD."','970829/1400')
addItem('lab V6','Acceptance tests 76E1','971128/1500')
addItem('class','Mid-term exam','970914/1300')
addItem('class', 'End of classes, at last', '971203/1350')
addItem('class','Personality assessment <a href="../forms/Pers_1.htm"'+
' target=_blank>#1</a>','970825/1400')
addItem('class', 'Class <a href="../forms/regist.htm"'+
' target=_blank>registration/questionnaire</a>','970823/1400')
...
Each entry consists of the invocation of a predefined Javascript method,
with parameters describing the category, the text of the item of concern,
and the deadline (date/time). Note that items items may be listed in any
order: classification, sorting, prioritizing and color coding are done
by web-Book at the time of display.
DELIVERY
As stated earlier, the concepts for web-Book, and even more so for
its successor webStract, are derived from the author's experience with
repeated delivery of a "project-driven" course in Software Engineering.
The projects are usually real-life problems presented by domain experts
(industry or academic). As a consequence, students face two problem areas:
a) learning about the project sponsor's domain of discourse and understanding
the problem, and b) learning how to translate this understanding into a
reliable working product that fulfills the sponsor's (frequently changing)
needs, within tight constraints on available resources. Students select
their preferred project and form their own teams, but they are expected
to cater to the former problem area on their own. The aim of the course
is to provide tools and guidance for the latter (formal) problem area.
We have therefore established the following principles for course delivery:
-
Students resolve domain specific problems as team work, and in collaboration
with the sponsor.
-
Topics are determined by the successive (formal) needs of the team projects.
-
The instructor guides the students in the identification of the topics
(e.g. through requests for submission of specific work-documents)
-
Students are expected to read up on the identified material on their own,
prior to a class session, dedicated to the topic.
-
Class sessions are used to introduce new topics from a general perspective,
and to discuss/review particular topics in detail.
-
Lab sessions are used to establish the link between the topics and the
development process, and to hold weekly formal meetings.
web-Book has been designed as an experiment addressing the diversity of
functionality required for the delivery of a course along these guidelines:
it embeds (a)synchronous services for team interaction; it provides the
instructor with means to post sample work-documents, with links into the
reference material, and to post deadlines, for reading assignments or for
submission of work-documents; it supports highly structured reference material,
for easy top-down presentation in class; it enables random access to topics
for direct access to details; it supports sidebars for fast access to additional
explanatory information.
It has been suggested earlier that we distinguish between a dynamic
and a static component. web-Book is accordingly packaged, into three parts:
-
the web-Book program (a hierarchy of html/javascript documents as illustrated
in fig. 9)
-
the dynamic service component (located on the course server)
-
the static course (reference) material
This separation allows students to access the course material either through
public labs or through a copy of the web-Book program on their personal
computer; they may download the knowledge component for local, off-line
viewing, and still maintain access to the operational component through
an internet connection. A copy of the knowledge component is left on the
server for access by visitors, and for live access during classes held
in a multimedia classroom.
Experiences: To be effective, hypermedia systems must be more than a
linking of multimedia resources but must, in Jonassen's words, be a "network
of nodes that are conceptually organized and interrelated by a linked structure"
[Jon91]. Determining an optimal design of this linked structure is a challenge
to educators, as Park observed [Prk91] and suggested the use of buttons
that follow the logical topic structure. In our WWW-supported course we
address the issue of knowledge structuring, by evolving the course along
a generic scenario for the development of a software engineering project
[Prn94] - consistent with schema based learning. The issue of navigation
is addressed by limiting the types of links to topic, thread and thematic,
i.e. even more restrictive than de La Passardiere and Dufresne's [dLPD92],
(also [Ekl95]), puntual, structural and historical
tools. The mere fact that, based on student's comments, we felt compelled
to introduce thread navigation, could be seen as undermining these researcher's
optimism. We shall limit our comments however, to the observation that
topically structured and linked material may be of little use to novices
who long for strict linear guidance until they have built up enough understanding;
but it is a powerful tool for systematic (top down) presentation and reviewing
of reference material.
Since in real life projects, the process steps may follow different
sequences, or may require different emphasis, we anticipated that using
hyperlinks would help absorb minor variations in depth and ordering of
learning needs. In spite of a study extended over two separate editions
of the course (results have been reported elsewhere [AnJo96]), no conclusive
evidence could be identified, confirming or dismissing that expectation.
We suspect that the combination of novelty of the material, topic sequencing
along a generic project, and tight time frames gave students little room
for variation, and therefore de facto lockstepped the development steps
with the learning process - quite the opposite of what we want to achieve
with project-driven training. On other issues our experience is consistent
with other researcher's reporting, e.g. like Hart [Hrt95], we have observed
an unexpected rush by students to create hard copies of the course material.
We are unclear whether the complete implementation of the targeted product
- project driven training, with problem based retrieval of learning material
- would affect this behaviour, or whether it is inherently tied to the
"threading" problem reported above.
An interesting observation w.r.t acceptance by students: a pattern
of initial excitement and enthusiasm, shifting towards a fairly even distribution
of total embracement, moderate acceptance and total rejection, observed
over the first two years, seems to flatten out: less ostensible initial
enthusiasm turns into broader moderate acceptance. This leads us to believe
that web-Book, and WWW-technology in general, is coming of age, moving
from a subjective love/hate relationship of a toy, to objective acceptance
of a useful tool.
From the teacher's perspective, the service component is most effective
in several ways: posting of the to do list has never again led to any discussions
about "misunderstood" deadlines; the ability to post forms for weekly reports
- and withdraw them shortly after the deadline - establishes very quickly
a reliable reporting procedure; and the fact that problem sets and suggested
solutions are open to public scrutiny, motivates course instructors to
work out "clean" solutions.
CONCLUSION
Over the past two years a growing number of tools for the development
and delivery of WWW courseware have been proposed or are being built ([BruSW96],
[GoSS96], [SchBW96], [HaCa95]). From our perspective, the roles of web-Book
w.r.t. Web-CT and Virtual-U are of closest interest.
Both Web-CT and Virtual-U are server based tools; the former operates
primarily as an elegant tool for generation of web courseware with built-in
facilities for delivery; the latter stands as a container for courseware
and supports primarily delivery. web-Book is not server-based: its entire
functionality is distributed to the user's platform, connecting to some
server only for acces to shared documents. This characteristic is essential
for the future role of web-Book within webStract. At present we envisage
web-Book taking a role between Web-CT and Virtual-U: booklets could be
produced and enhanced with Web-CT, and web-Book would instantiate a particular
style of course delivery within Virtual-U.
The experience gained with web-Book, in particular some of the above
"shortcomings" has convinced us that we are on a track worthwile exploring;
a track along which web-Book in its present form is a necessary intermediate
step. In our ongoing work we have streamlined the task of web-Book as a
tool to explore and navigate sophisticated electronic books, within a wider
concept: webStract - an imaginary term alluding to the double role of abstracting
information from the web, and extracting context dependent portions on
demand.
webStract extends the scope of web-Book from a navigational, individualized
framework to a distributed knowledge base and communication tool for collaborative
learning. A number of significant enhancements integrated into one platform
independent product, contribute to the uniqueness of the targeted product:
A first enhancement is the product's database - an extension from collating
HTML documents to a document-independent "knowledge base" potentially capable
of archiving, referencing and linking any electronic document. WebStract
performs content (keyterm) analysis of submitted documents and records
the results in the database as MCF (Meta Content Format) descriptors, which
can be enriched by the content providers as well as the end users. Content
analysis consists of statistical, language independent extraction of keyterms
and a characterization as to their distribution. The database can be searched;
inference about such characterizations is used for preliminary sorting
of the retrieved documents. The results can be collated and elucidated
into "books", which can be viewed by the streamlined version of web-Book,
capable of handling a multitude of electronic documents (e-mail fragments,
synchronous meeting reports, HTML, pdf ,...).
The second enhancement is a move from the single-user model of the
web-Book to a distributed, multi-user system. A webStract deployment can
be visualised as a set of "nodes". Each node has access to a pool of data
items, either local to the user or through connections to other nodes.
Each data item will be either public, private, or keyed: public meaning
any other node connecting to the node can access the data; private meaning
only the owner can access the data; and keyed meaning the owner can selectively
control who has access to the data. With the architectural shift to a distributed
environment, a significant expansion of the services becomes possible.
webStract tightly integrates synchronous and asynchronous interaction through
the concept of "foyers": for synchronous meetings, interested (or invited)
users congregate in dedicated meeting rooms operated by electronic clerks
("bots"); for asynchronous users may post to bulletin boards in the foyer,
post messages to individuals or groups, or join particular discussion threads.
All asynchronous documents generated through such interactions are
implicitly analyzed and recorded in the database, which makes them all
retrievable through the search mechanisms. All documents recorded in the
database can also be annotated, i.e. individual users may create persistent
notes as they browse documents in the knowledge base, and may review them
each time the carrying document is retrieved.
Much of the above functionality is already in place and our focus is
currently on graph-based project guidance, and integration of automated
activity reporting for evaluation purposes. We target the '98 spring edition
of our Software Engineering course as a first test vehicle for webStract/web-Book.
Acknowledgement
The author wishes to acknowledge partial financial support for an early
version of web-Book, by the "Alternative Delivery Initiative" at the University
of Alberta. Development and evaluation of webStract are being made possible
through "Learning Enhancement Envelope" grants from the Alberta Government
and funding from the "Office of Learning Technologies" of the Government
of Canada.
References
[AnJo96] Anderson T. and Joerg .W, Perceived Effectiveness of World
Wide Web to Supplement University Level Classroom Instruction. Canadian
Journal of Educational Communications 25(1) 19-36
[BruSW96] Brusilovsky P., Schwarz E., and Weber G., A Tool for Developing
Adaptive Electronic Textbooks on WWW, Proc. WebNet-96, 1996
[dLPD92] de La Passardiere B., and Dufresne A., Adaptive navigational
tools for educational hypermedia, Proc. ICCAL 1992
[Ekl95] Eklund J., Cognitive models for structuring hypermedia and
implications for learning from the world-wide-web, Proc. of ACCE Conf.,
1995
[GoSS96] Goldberg M., Salari S., and Swoboda P. World Wide Web -
Course Tool: An Environment for building WWW-based Courses, Computer
Networks and ISDN Systems, 28, 1996
[HaCa95] Harasim L. and Calvert T., The Virtual University and continuing
education for engineers. Proc. 6th World Conference on Continuing Engineering
Education, Brazil, 1995
[Hrt95] Hart G., Learning Styles and Hypertext: Exploring User Attitudes,
Proc. ASCILITE'95 Conf., 1995
[Jon91] Jonassen D., Hypertext as instructional design, Educational
Training Research and Development, Vol. 39, Nr. 1, 1991
[Prk91] Park O., Hypermedia: Functional issues and research issues,
Educational Technology, Vol. 331, Nr. 8, 1991
[Prn94] Parnas D., Teaching Programming As if it Were Engineering,
Proc. ASEE Conf. 1994
[SchBW96] Schwarz E., Brusilovsky P., and Weber G., World-Wide Intelligent
TextBooks, Proc. ED-TELECOM'96 Conf., 1996
APPENDIX - Figures
Figure 1: Sample navigation bar of the '94-'95 version
Figure 2: Navigation frames of the '95-'96 version
Figure 3: Valid document structures in web-Book
Figure 4: Table for selection of services
Figure 5: View of web-Book panels (Software Eng. course/ Booklet
"Introduction" selected)
Figure 6: "To Do List" panels
Figure 7: Effects of buttons in header panel of table of contents
Figure 8: Viewing panels and navigation
Figure 9: web-Book architecture (HTML/Javascript implementation)
Werner B. Joerg
Professor, E&CE Dept.
University of Alberta
Edmonton, Alberta T6G 2G7 Canada
wjoerg@ee.ualberta.ca
http://www.ee.ualberta.ca/~wjoerg
©, 1997. The author, W.B. Joerg, assigns to the
University of New Brunswick and other educational and non-profit institutions
a non-exclusive license to use this document for personal use and in courses
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to the University of New Brunswick to publish this document in full on
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