Best-designed Educational Hypermedia Website

The best-designed educational hypermedia website that I nominate is “The educational games on the Nobelprize.org”.

There are some aspects that I am looking for a well-designed educational hypermedia website:

1) Structure:

First, when I click into a website, I prefer it with a clear and logical structure. A webpage can content a lot of links and graphs that overwhelm readers. Instead of throwing a lot of information and links without organization, a clear and coherent structure can give readers a better sense of where they are and where they want to go. The structure of Nobelprize.org helps the navigation easier, prevents the possibility of disorientation and also helps readers to build up mental maps/representation of hypertext structure.

2) Content:

If the structure is the skeleton to a website, the content is the flesh. Without meaningful and rich content, a well-structured website is still hollow, especially the websites designed for educational purpose. I have visited some websites that contain fancy flash animations or graphic designs, but they can only catch my attention for a few minutes and then I found I did not learn too much from it. The educational games on the Nobelprize.org do not only have well-designed games, they also provide related readings, graphics, and information about the experts that help readers know the content better to learn while playing. However, the website was not designed simply for education, but its rich content provides great potential for teaching and learning.

3) Attraction:

When I browsed many educational websites on Homeschool.com's Top 100 Educational Web Sites of 2008, I found most of them are database and texts with hyperlinks. I can easily lose my attention and don’t know where I should go or don’t want to keep going while browsing some websites. Learning is not always interesting, and it requires effort, especially learning difficult contents. The games on Nobelprize.org attract readers' attentions and motivation them to learn more.

Of course, there are some improvements in making the website better. First, the website provides great materials but no guides for teachers or parents to implement them for learning. If some lesson plans or application ideas are provided, educators could use them more effectively. Second, one unique functions that Internet has is to provide forum for people around the world. If a form is designed to provoke more communications between students, teachers, parents and experts, learners could be highly benefited by feedback and different points of view.

In addition to the Nobelprize.org website, I also recommend some other websites that I think are well-designed:

• Math Playground Contains diverse activities (games, word problems, puzzles, videos, etc) to teach math.
  
• BrainPOP Contains considerable amount of educational animations from various content areas.

Hypertext Fiction

Welcome to my first hypertext fiction--
Crime Scene Investigation
http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~hpai/hypertext_fiction.htm

Writing the non-linear text is more difficult than the regular linear writing to me. When writing linearly, I only need to think one logical storyline or argument to build up my story. However, writing the non-linear text requires multiple tracks of thoughts to construct multiple possibilities of storylines.

First, I tried to think of a context which is interesting to write a hypertext fiction. My inspiration was from one of the CSI episodes (it is quite obvious). However, CSI stories usually flashback from a dead body. It added more complication to develop the non-liner text because of the twisted timeline. Besides, I also need to think about what choices the viewers can click on. Too many choices would create more complexity that is out of my control. Therefore, I decided to choose two or three items on each page that readers can “investigate” into or make a decision based on the evidence. Next, I followed each item to develop the storylines. For example, the “1-intch deep scratch” link on the 2nd webpage which leads to the reasoning that “the girl was pushed from the window” on the 3rd page. The 3rd page contains two more items for viewers to research into, and each of them also lead to another page. Besides the branching approach, I also found connections between some WebPages. Thus, not all link leads to one unique page. Some of them could lead to similar story paths.

When creating WebPages, I tended to write about one main character or one location, and then make expansion and connection between each scenario. Sometimes I found myself lost within the structure I was constructing and wondered “where am I now?” I also found that I was building the connections step by step while writing. It was hard for me to have a clear and fixed structure before the writing.