Editor's Note:

NetTech is the Northeast Regional Technology in Education Consortium, of which CUNY is the lead partner. NetTech's URL is http://www.nettech.org

At NetTech's Forum on Hypermedia, Teaching and Technology, hosted last November by the Scholarly Technology Group (STG) at Brown University, speakers and guests alike identified two problems facing educational enthusiasms for hypertext and hypermedia, and these problems have been echoed recently in popular, more general discussions of educational technology.

One problem is the dearth of examples, both successful and unsuccessful, of principled, well-documented attempts to integrate networked hypermedia with specific instructional goals and curricular philosophies. A second was the difficulty in assessing the impact of the use of hypermedia on teaching and learning. Leaving aside the question of whether these issues are as important as educational researchers and policy makers would have us believe, it is interesting to think both about how these problems might be addressed, and why the development of hypermedia systems and hypertext theory has come so far without addressing them.

The NetTech/STG Forum was part of a larger, ongoing study of "best and promising practices in educational hypermedia." As the term "best practice" is not indigenous to education (it seems to have come from business and management literature, where it is discussed as a form of "bench-marking"), it is worthwhile to distinguish four senses of the term that appear in current discussions of educational hypermedia, and educational technology generally:

1. Best practice as improved productivity

Andries van Dam's FRESS, one of the earliest, and in some ways the most successful, hypertext/hypermedia systems, was developed with funds from the U.S. Navy, as part of an effort to improve efficiency and productivity in the maintenance of complex equipment. As industrial concerns continue to play a role in hypermedia system research, it is no surprise that discussions of the use of hypermedia for educational purposes often include claims about the positive effect of such systems on educational efficiency.

2. Best practice as exemplary data organization.

Most, if not all, of the pioneers of hypertext cite Vannevar Bush's 1945 Atlantic Monthly article, "As We May Think," as the text that inspired contemporary hypertext systems. Bush's article remains a remarkable read, but it is significant that while he mentioned explicitly the transformative power his "memex" device would exert on the practices of physicists, chemists, historians, and a variety of other professionals, he said absolutely nothing about educators or education. Bush's vision was about the intelligent organization and management of great quantities of information, and this notion of intelligent data design and organization dominates much of the hypertext literature even today.

3. Best practice as technical support, facilitation and enhancement of exemplary instructional or curricular practices.

One of the difficulties in implementing new technologies in classrooms is that the technologies come with so many implicit pedagogical and cognitive assumptions built into them that even expert classroom teachers are hard-pressed to find ways to integrate them into their most successful teaching and learning activities. As more schools and classrooms become connected to the most successful hypermedia system yet invented (the World Wide Web), we see a demand for examples of best practice in this sense of using technology to further instructional techniques and approaches that have already proven successful in the absence of the new technology.

4. Best practice as the creation, through the use of technology, of superior instructional and curricular practices.

Educators frequently seek new technologies precisely when they feel their current practices need to be reformed. Thus we find a demand for examples of best practice in the sense of using technology to transform and generate new successful kinds of teaching and learning activities, even when it is not clear how these new activities will be recognized.

Here it becomes clear why the problems mentioned at the start (the problems of finding exemplary applications, and assessing the impact, of educational hypermedia) have proven difficult to solve and even address. Discussions of the educational promise and usefulness of hypermedia often mix, or equivocate on, the kinds of best practice mentioned above.

Similarly, while new technologies are often promoted as leading to best practices in the 4th sense, most of these claims can be justified, if at all, only as claims to best practice in the 3rd sense; that is, claims about the revolutionary impact of technology on teaching and learning can only be demonstrated within the context of the traditional educational structures and practices they promised to transform. Finally, many of the claims to best practice in the 3rd sense turn out only to be examples of best practice in the 2nd sense (e.g., discussions of excellent Web resources that are not informed by carefully articulated approaches to instruction).

These difficulties and ambiguities might of course be addressed by an appropriate discipline, in an appropriate literature, so it is interesting to note how some of the current hypertext literatures manage to avoid the issues of instruction, practical pedagogy, and evaluation (issues with which educators in K-12 are arguably most concerned). One can identify at least three such literatures:

First, there is the hypertext/hypermedia literature of the computer scientists, which focuses primarily on hypermedia system design and the development of tools for navigating and manipulating those systems. This literature traces its inspiration to the works of Theodore H. Nelson, Andries van Dam, and Doug Englebart, and while there is sometimes discussion of "the user" and "human-computer interaction," there is little awareness of curricular and instructional issues. Although there is hope that the relatively young field of computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) may bring contemporary instructional theory to bear on system designs and discussions, there remains a large gap between the computer science community and those devoted to the study of teaching and learning.

Second, there is the hypertext/hypermedia literature of the literary and cultural theorists. Here Barthes, Foucault, and even Derrida, are often cited as theoretical forefathers, while Cortazar's Hopscotch, Perec's W, and Coover's "The Babysitter", are thought to have suggested ideas instantiated in computer-based hypertexts; but, the pioneering work of hypertext theory is probably George Landow's brightly-colored classic of 1992, Hypertext. The primary focus of this literature is on hypertext and hypermedia as a theory, or an embodiment of a theory, about reading, writing and textuality, and much of the language easily resists the sorts of clear interpretation that would render it useful in the context of K-12 instruction and reform. This is not to say that hypertext theory generally fails to discuss education, but it has failed to go much beyond suggesting the possibility of new ways of teaching and learning.

Third, there is the hypertext/hypermedia literature of the educational technologists and cognitive psychologists. Although ostensibly about theories of instruction and learning, most of this literature has proven either difficult to interpret or difficult to take seriously. Besides the usual problems of verification we associate with social sciences, the researchers who study educational hypermedia often make cognitive claims when it is not clear that anything but behavioral claims are warranted. Because users of computer-based hypermedia systems are so constrained by these systems, claims about how such systems affect student "thinking" are often more plausibly interpreted as claims about how students respond to particular sets of stimuli, and we suspect these are very different kinds of claims.

If I have exaggerated the degree to which much of the hypertext and hypermedia literature fails to address the most pressing problems confronting our studies of exemplary educational applications of hypertext and hypermedia, it is because I think there is a genuine need for a discipline, grounded both in educational practice and contemporary computing technology, that can carry out empirical and theoretical analyses of the variety of best practices mentioned earlier.

I call this discipline "Educational Informatics," because it takes as its domain all of the information sciences, but approaches each with questions and concerns fundamental to the theory and practice of education. As large numbers of educators continue to work with Web-based hypermedia, and other networked technologies, in order to enhance and transform their instructional and curricular practices, we can hope that an educational informatics literature will develop to meet their needs.