Map-based horizontal navigation in educational Hypertext

Abstract

This paper discusses the problem of horizontal (non-hierarchical) navigation in modern educational courseware. We will look at why horizontal links disappear, how to support horizontal navigation in modern hyper-courseware, and our earlier attempts to provide horizontal navigation in Web-based electronic textbooks. Here, we present map-based navigation - a new approach to support horizontal navigation in open corpus educational courseware that we are currently investigating. We will describe the mechanism behind this approach, present a system KnowledgeSea that implements this approach, and provide some results of a classroom study of this system.