ICT in Education

Thoughts on: Navigation options in Interactive Multimedia (Harper, 1992)

September 7, 2007

Harper, B. (1992) Navigation Options in Interactive Multimedia. In J. G. Hedberg and J. Steele, Educational Technology for the Clever Country, Selected papers from EdTech’92,Conference of the Australian Society for Educational Technology. University of Adelaide-Australia, 1-3 October (pp 10-16). Belconnen, A.C.T. : AJET Publication for the Society.

This article, like many others, starts out with the usual rah-rah interactive multimedia is great, shift to learner-control, enriching the learning experience yada yada spiel. It’s all fairly true but it seems to be at the start of every article I’ve read for a while now.

Once it gets past this preliminary stuff though, it is actually fairly useful and contains a number of interesting approaches to designing navigation in multimedia. It’s a little unfortunate that the article is 15 years old though as you get the sense that there’s probably been a lot more work done since. It therefore requires a little extrapolation to move the concepts to the 3D game based environment that I’m thinking about (I think Wolfenstein 3D had only just been released at the time this was written)

My project is to develop a 3D game space that the learner walks through in first person perspective. It provides new teachers at CIT an orientation to the services and resources available within the Education Development Centre at CIT, which includes Curriculum, Teacher Education, the Library and Flexible Learning Solutions (the online learning unit).

It’s possible to run this as a multiplayer game which allows for real-time text chat interaction between a number of players.

I’ll run through some of the interesting ideas about multimedia navigation in the paper and how I might use them in my game.

(To begin, here is why good navigation design is important)

“… used effectively, the technology can allow users to interact in ways that the designers of the system did not plan… good instructional design of interactive multimedia materials makes it unnecessary to materials to be structured for the learner. Effective student use of unstructured materials however, will depend on the type of access to the information the users can obtain i.e. the navigation options available to the user. ”

“When a learner can branch down multiple paths and rapidly change the direction and focus of the learning sequence, there is possible interference with effective learning through the inappropriate application of information by the learner to their internal schemas”

Navigation options:

“the guide metaphor where a character is created and used by the author to link ideas and visual travel through the hypermedia materials” – this is certainly one approach to the game and could be done in several different ways.

A non-player-character is automated and sets the learner tasks to complete in the environment (although this isn’t a guide so much I guess) – there could be NPCs in hallways that can answer basic queries about where certain areas are. The other option is to have a live guide in the multiplayer version who runs a bit of an orientation – though this isn’t necessarily very practical or realistic.

“other suggested structures include those which are based on ideas such as sequential navigation (using cues to show how far you are along a path; the clues varying from a simple screen number of the total or some conceptual description of the sequence), visual navigation (using a plan of the possible paths) and hybrid navigation (mixtures of both) (Hedberg & Harper, 1991)”

This has given me some thoughts about ways to set up the activities – in recreational gaming I’m fairly partial to sandpit style games such as the Grand Theft Auto series, where you can take on missions or just explore the environment. (But you need to complete certain missions to unlock new missions or new parts of the environment). I could have the entire area explorable, with different kinds of resources accessible (including being able to chat to all the staff) as well as having a room where you can get your missions from. You could collect keys (or something) which allow you to unlock rooms which provide additional missions. You could measure your progress by looking at the rooms you’ve opened.

Techniques to provide navigation cues for users:

“using colour to identify the area or major learning path”

This actually works pretty well as we recently had the rooms in our area repainted and each dept went with a different colour scheme. I’m thinking that it would be useful to have a few “You are here” maps around the place and/or some signs which could be colour coded without too much difficulty.

“simple use of contextual clues, regular use of a standard format of basic word style format to indicate links with other sources of information”

Other than the fact that this seems like a fairly tortured sentence, what I got from it was that in the rooms, on the walls near the desks of the different people we could have text and icons that reflect their areas of expertise. These could also be replicated on the maps. (E.g an artists palette for our graphic designer) 

“written directions which appear in separate areas or windows to the information required to learn the underlying concepts”

I agree with this idea although I’m not sure entirely how to put it into action in the software that I’m thinking of. (FPS Creator). If the player/learner had a key that they could toggle a PDA on and off, you could have this information there. It could be possible to have some computer screens that the player/learner could access this information from but they would need to go to the screen any time they wanted to check a detail. If it was a multiplayer game I guess the instructions could just sit in the chat window. 

“enabling learning path maps to be modified highlighting the paths which have been travelled”

This comes back to my earlier point about knowing what you’ve done by what rooms you’ve unlocked.  I’m a little unsure about this however as it goes against my desire to have an environment that people can wander around completely freely. 

“creating new links by the learner using a series of tools which enable the package to be modified, either by adding new information or by adding new hypertext linkages based on the students’ own conceptual maps”

It would be great if there was some way to embed web access (and presumably a wiki) into a part of the game. As far as I’m aware, this isn’t an option but I’ll keep looking. A setup like the 3D browser called 3B would be good – it could live on the smartboard in the training/conference room part of the game.

Defining Navigation types:

This is another of those instances where the datedness of this article shows – the concepts are still sound, just behind the times.

“Materials can be designed to focus on the appropriate development of schema and hence improve learning efficiency. In effect, any navigational system must employ elements with as much intrinsic meaning as possible… this link can be enhanced through understandable and well chosen metaphors”

He goes on to list a few different options:

• Modal (icon based)
• Relational (stack maps)
  
• Hierarchical (more like an organisational chart or a website map)
  
• Sequential (basic back, forward and index buttons)
• Geographical/Spatial (much closer to Florin’s info landscape model – and my 3d game)
• Conceptual (metaphor + info landscape)  
  

The Geographical/Spatial seems to reflect my approach with the game so I guess I’ll note the quote:

“selecting parts of a whole by an inherent physical/geographic relationship. This approach might be exemplified region by using a map as a link between objects” – or a navigable 3D environment.

 I had a few other thoughts as I was reading this paper:

What about a bookshelf in every person’s area? (Or similar metaphor for stored info – maybe a pda?)

It would be good to be able to access the online pd courses from inside the game – again, in game web access is the key.

Entry Filed under: 913, General, constructivism, democratic, e-learning, eLearning, education design, games in education, information landscape, network based learning, scenarios, strategies, technology. .