Facilitating the development of representations in hypertext with IDE

Abstract

Hypertext systems are used for a variety of representational tasks, many that involve fairly formalized structures. Because hypertext systems are generally intended for developing informal (unstructured data) and semi-formal (semantic networks) structures, developing more formal structures can be difficult. Regular patterns in structures must often be recreated from primitive elements (individual nodes and links) resulting in a high overhead cost. In this paper we describe the Instructional Design Environment, or IDE, a hypertext system application that facilitates the rapid and accurate creation of regular network patterns in hypertext. IDE focuses on the task of instructional design, but its facilities are general and useful to many representation tasks. IDE features structure accelerators that provide simple menu interfaces to (1) define network structures out of patterns of typed node and link connections, (2) create new node types that contain structured content, and (3) tailor the interface for creating cards, links and structures to focus attention during different stages of the representation task. These mechanisms allow the user to tailor the hypertext environment to better meet his or her representational needs. We also report on the field use of IDE by instructional designers..