ICT in Education

Thoughts on: Information Landscapes – Florin (1990)

August 27, 2007

Florin, F. (1990) Information Landscapes. In S. Ambron & K. Hooper (Eds) Learning with Interactive Multimedia. Microsoft Press. pp. 27-49.

“As you visit an information landscape, you can merely walk along pathways and look at roadside attractions, or you can choose from many different options. Some of the options take you on linear trails, which you experience passively from start to finish, as you would ride in a bus. Other activities give you local control – similar to driving a car. Maps can show you a bird’s eye view of the territory and guides can take you on tours or give you more conversational assistance.”

Fabice Florin presents a range of different models for presenting information – broken into five essential structures:

• Collections of data
• Interactive documentaries
• Annotated movies
• Networks of guides
• Hands-on activities

“I have referred to raw images, sounds, text, and film clips as data, regardless of media type. Meaningful arrangments of such data into thoughtful presentations are referred to as information”

collections of data:

“the simplest way to present knowledge is to break it down into collections of similar data or materials” Should that be information?

Data could be organised in a cube shape, with an x, y and z axis to define it in different ways (eg data could be presented chronologically along the x – width – axis, thematically along the y – height – axis and alphabetically along the z – depth – axis)

This system has limitations in that it may be necessary to categorise data in more than 3 ways and it may be difficult to create meaningful connections between the data in this manner.

Florin reached these conclusions about this approach:

• “Clusters of tightly interconnected materials focused on specific topics are more satisfying that thin layers of data covering broad subjects. For example, isolated pictures are not as interesting as sets of five or more, where each picture in the set adds meaning to the others, exposing relations hidden in the single shot
• In most cases, pictures with no good captions or data are not very useful
• Still pictures and text can ofter be perecived as lifeless unless they are combined with sound or motion footage. I highly recommend that great care be given to the selection of a rich audio track and, if possible, film or video clips that bring a subject to life.”

interactive documentaries:

“a more elaborate structure for an information landscape is the interactive documentary, which centres all data around modular presentations. These presentations can be short stories or interactive diagrams linked to related materials. By focusing on such presentations as building blocks of an information landscape, more meaning is given to the materials, connecting data points to each other along specific lines of thought. These nodes of informations can now be browsed as integrated documents, rather than as disconnected data. Moreover, users can choose the order in which these presentations appear and interrupt them at will”

(e.g a sequence of video clips set up like a storyboard, with a brief explanatory title below each one)

The important aspect is that the information is connected but democratically accessible and learners can dig down into related collections of data from the starting point.

“It is a collection of experiences and ideas about a given subject, available to users in either linear or nonlinear modules, story modules organise materials against a temporal axis, whereas place modules arrange them in a spatial layout.”

“A clear drawback however is that often no easy way exists for first-time users to know which modules to try first, and some time needs to be spent poking around and playing clips at random before discovering what is available”

annotated movies

“In this structure, a feature-length movie is the main backbone of the landscape. Unlike the free-form browsing approach of the interactive documentary, the annotated movie has a strong linear structure. Viewers are encouraged to view the entire movie and then to use the interactive information environment surrounding the movie to revisit it and explore the issues that it raises”

This is one of many examples in which this print based article really suffers from the lack of a supplementary website, where we can actually experience the material being discussed. I think I understand it but I’m not sure if this means that the whole movie is clickable, providing interactivity all the way through or if it is a menu that offers this option. As far as I can see, it’s the former, but being able to see this in action would be a tremendous help.

“One of the main advantages of the annotated movie is that the narrative provides a common thread that ties together all subject in the information landscape. Having to build around a specific storyline encourages the interactive developers to go for depth rather than breadth, which makes for a richer environment”

networks of guides

“Looming on the horizon is a fascinating challenge, that of building information landscapes containing individual guides who provide users with personalised assistance”

Perhaps something like the internet – making use of real people and computer mediated communications? (Ah, ok, he comes to this as an option)

“The best way for an information landscape to grow is through live channels of communication to and from the outside world, allowing for feedback, editing, updates and so on. In such a scenario, the process becomes more important than the actual product. The system becomes a focal point for the development of a community of interested users and authors who collectively extend the shared knowledgebase.

This requires a simple but powerful set of composition tools that allow content experts and novice users to mark, annotate, link and otherwise interconnect various parts of the information landscape. Such tools would let users compare different points of view and develop their own through essays, diagrams, tours and other custom presentations. Ultimately, any user could become a guide to the environment.

To illustrate this concept, I have added guides to the landscape in my diagram. These guides add their knowledge to the environment by connecting various information nodes and data points; the webs they weave reach deep within the shared landscape, but they also extend out into the real world.”

Ok, well this impresses me a fair bit – certainly for something written in 1990. It seems to predict Wikipedia and the social web by quite a few years. (It is very much in keeping with Tim Berners Lee’s initial vision for the World Wide Web)

“As larger user communities gather around our information landscapes, different classes of guides are likely to emerge, including:

• System operators, information brokers and editors – who provide general services to help connect users with what they are looking for (i.e. Search engines, RSS? )
• Specialists and content experts – who concentrate on specific subjects and report on their particular knowledge domain (websites)
  
• Interdisciplinary authors – who provide editorial commentaries and personal insights across a wide range of subjects
• Other users – who share tips with each other about interesting information they have found or added to the system (the blogosphere, social web news sites like Digg, Wikipedia)

hands-on activities

“the guiding principle is that they be fun and that they help users gain new insights”

“these activities are very compelling because they let users participate as players in the environment, not merely as spectators. The locus of control is shifted from the designers back to the users. Rather than absorb someone else’s ideas, users now determine the outcome of their individual experiences. The make choices and reach their own conclusions. This deepens their understanding of the subject, because that knowledge was discovered “hands-on” and is now theirs”

“The reason such activities seem so important is that they suggest different modes of interaction between users and their information environment. An activity provides an arena for people to play in and materials to play with; most importantly, however, it gives people ideas of what to do in that context”

Ok, so he thinks that games and scenario based activity is good – I’m hardly going to argue with that.  

design factors to consider

“The first step in designing an information resource is to define it’s primary purpose:

• Is it meant as a generic resource or to teach a specific topic?
• How broad does it have to be?
• Who is the intended user group?
• How will users interact with it?
•  Where do they need the most help?

The next step is to identify the materials available for that project:

• How much data is provided for each item?
• Are the items catalogued?
• Are they cross-indexed?
• Have they been annotated or edited together with a single commentary?
•  Are they disparate documents or have they been carefully researched and sorted?

You now have to select a particular structure as the main framework of the landscape. The purpose of the project and the nature of the materials may suggest one but more often it is a creative call. This process feels somewhat like landscaping or urban design:

• What primary features do you want to build around?
• Which secondary features do you want to emphasise?
• How do you balance these different elements?
• How do people move from one to another?

I like to think of the different structures presented above as different types of space in a rural landscape. For example, collections could be fields of raw materials, a documentary could be seen as a small town, a movie might flow like a stream through the landscape, guides might be shown as figures on a hilltop and activities might be represented by a playground.

Like a city planner, you are designing not only the structure of the information landscape but also the flows and processes that take place in and around that environment. In the end, you really are shaping the culture of a user group, not just its database. “

I think this is one of the most useful things I have read in this course so far. Looking forward to seeing how I can put it into practice.  

Entry Filed under: 913, General, democratic, games in education, information landscape, multimedia, network based learning, prescriptive. .