A hypertext open learning system for writers

Ins t ruc t iona l Science 21 :125 -138 (1992) 125 © K l u w e r A c a d e m i c Publ ishers , Dordrecht - - Pr in ted in the Ne ther lands

A Hypertext Open Learning System for Writers

NOEL WILLIAMS

Communication and Information Research Group, Division of Communication Studies and English, Sheffield City Polytechnic, 36 Collegiate Crescent, Sheffield $102BP, United Kingdom

Abstract. In this article I describe three key design issues which underlie a CIRG project building an open learning hypertext package for teaching writing skills. These are issues in: • combining flexible materials with fixed structures; • giving students real flexibility in learning; • the nature of interaction in hypertext writing teaching. I outline a design strategy to meet problems in all these areas.

THE CONTEXT

The Communicat ion and Informat ion Research Group (CIRG) at Sheffield City Polytechnic is developing a hyper tex t writ ing skills package to meet student needs across the Polytechnic. In our earlier work, developing the postwriting software Ruskin, CIRG concluded that, to be meaningful to many students, and therefore to be effective, tutorial writing software needs to provide flexibility in depth, giving advice for student writers tha t is as contextualised a n d as detailed as each par t icu la r s tudent requires (Williams et al., 1988). This is especially t rue in the Polytechnic context, with a wide var ie ty of students, course and types of writing. Hyper text appeared an ideal delivery vehicle for teaching student writing.

The hyper text package under development is initially restricted to writing skills, but will eventually be expanded to incorporate a wide range of other communication skills. It must be delivered on hardware widely available in the institution, which in practice means IBM PCs and clones. The Polytechnic aims to develop an 'electronic campus' whose del ivery terminals will typically be IBM 286 PCs. After evaluating competing hypertext systems for the PC, we decided tha t only Toolbook, running under Microsoft Windows 3.0, was likely to meet our needs, but we favoured Hypercard on the Apple Macintosh (as we already had Hypercard development expertise and prefer the Macintosh for courseware delivery), so Hypercard became our development software and Toolbook the main delivery software.

This dual approach means, of course, that we must design within the limitations of both systems. Hypercard provides a very useful authoring package for teachers and trainers developing distance learning or open

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learning materials, though it falls short of the ideal (see for example the evaluation offered by Alexander, 1989). Toolbook remains to be proven. We are using Hypercard 1.2 for maximal compat ibi l i ty across Macintoshes, although this means that the attractions of Hypercard 2.0 are lost to us. Toolbook, in comparison with Hypercard 1.2, seems to offer more as it gives colour and multiple cards on screen, although it is noticeably slow on occasions. We are not pushing Toolbook to its limits, but simply using it as a PC Hypercard look-alike to simplify the conversion process.

DESIGN ISSUES

Flex ib le Structure Versus F ixed Structure

The package under development is intended as both a suite of materials for varied use within existing courses and a coherent course in its own right. This creates design problems, as two contradictory tendencies flow from these:

• the materials must deal flexibly with different kinds of writer in different contexts, with different problems and needs;

• the materials must offer a single, unified and complete experience.

These two needs correspond to the two philosophies of learning labelled open learning and distance learning, (which are not the same thing), which in tu rn match opposed drives in Higher Education (HE). Open learning is the philosophy of openness and flexibility, under which a student can choose what s/he wants to learn, how s/he wants to learn it, and when i t will be learned, at every level where choice might be possible. Appropriate buzz phrases are student centred learning, learner control of pace and learner choice. In HE this corresponds to the drive to open up education to a greater range of students, who have a greater range of needs and desires than HE is currently equipped to cope with, such as mature students, women returners, day release and sandwich students, access students, overseas students and so on.

Distance learning can be open learning. However, distance learning essentially is delivery of educational materials at a distance from the originating institution. The key problems with distance learning are largely those of managing courses remotely. To cope with the difficulties of management many distance learning courses are very rigid about the materials they offer and the order those materials must be encountered. The easiest distance learning courses to administer by far are those with a conventional linear sequence which the student must encounter in fixed progressive order. In such a s t ructure , monitor ing and supporting students at a distance is much easier than within structures tha t allow for student variation.

Hyper tex t teaching mater ia ls are invariably distance mater ia ls (delivered remote from their originators). Though they can be used in contact classes they rarely are, as this defeats the object of most tutors

A Hypertext Open Learning System for Writers 127

in developing computer based education. Hypertext materials also are invariably open learning materials, if they are to make full use of the medium. We can, of course, create l inear courses using hypertext resources, but then the multiple information networks which are the essence of hypertext are lost.

There have been inhouse training packages produced using hypertext, including courses on writing, produced within both philosophies; both as polyvocal, learning support environments for students to learn within (Allinson and Hammond, 1989) which are open and flexible (e.g. Smith et al., 1990); and with a progressive, linear structure in mind as a way of delivering courses without lecturer involvement (e.g. Ross, 1990).

So the first significant design issue in our writing package obviously was tha t it must satisfy the needs both of the flexible, open learning context and the linear, standalone course.

Flexible Learning

Hypertext is enthused over as a medium of flexible learning. Such flexibility is educationally valuable if it means a teaching package can address different student needs, different student abilities, or both. Yet it is more difficult to ensure true flexibility in open learning materials than in face-to-face contact, for materials cannot respond as people do. Even hypertext materials cannot cope with unexpected needs. If a computer system is to be t ruly flexible, its design mus t take into account all possible problems and needs. (And, of course, the designer who strives to include everything may find effort wasted, if students avoid blocks of the material in practice).

So, simply creating a system which provides for a range of contexts and skill levels is in itself inadequate. This does create a system which is flexible, but it is likely that:

• it will be less flexible than the equivalent human contact; • some students would not receive the materials best matched to their

needs and abilities.

In the context I describe, the first of these is not seen as significant, as the underlying resource decisions favour computer-based delivery over human contact, irrespective of the educational values of either. However, we have taken some steps to lead students towards personal, individual activities which will be meaningful to them (notably in the 'Ideas' function, described below). The second point is a real issue for developers of hypertext learning materials, especially in the field of writing, and especially when we are concerned to teach not just theory but also skills.

We might say that a truly interactive system is one tha t models the student accurately and responds to particular needs appropriately: an Intelligent Teaching System (ITS), in fact. ITS are much touted in the artificial intelligence literature. However, the current state of our knowledge suggests tha t adaptive systems in teaching are not sophisticated enough to deal with real user variability, largely because

128 Noel Wi l l i ams

of the limitations of user modelling (see, for example, Self, 1988; du Boulay and Sloman, 1988). Even attempts to design expert systems purely for student assessment (i.e. computer-aided self assessment, the essential diagnosis prior to training) are currently largely only in prototype form (e.g. Arshad, 1989; Waite and Goodman, 1989).

Where learner models of some value exist, they have been developed in respect of domains which are narrow, well understood and in which s tudent problem solving is expressible (in principle, at least) as the progressive acquisition of a series of rules. As has often been observed, writing is not such a clearly defined domain and, if we can describe writing as problem solving (an issue in itself), it is not problem solving we can describe satisfactorily as discrete rules to be acquired.

So we cannot look to the system to understand the student. Hypertext systems for teaching writing are not going to have models of learners which are good enough to respond flexibly to their needs. Therefore it is up to the student, through his or her dialogue with the tutors who have designed the system, to construct an appropriate path through the materials.

Unstructured, flexible hypertext materials may actually c a u s e problems for students attempting such a route, compared with linear text, because they may make it harder for the student to identify needs. Again we face the issue of how to balance structure and flexibility. For a student to select the most appropriate training materials from those on offer, tha t student must know which of the available choices is best suited to his or her abilities and context. This implies tha t students have a reasonable unders tanding of their wri t ing abilities and problems, and some understanding of how those problems might be addressed, clearly a false assumption for many such students.

One strategy used in Computer Assisted Learning (CAL) is for the designer to assume a certain norm of ability (in this case it would be 'average writing skills'), and offer students advanced and remedial materials, let us say, above and below that norm. Here we have a limited student model: students are seen as one of three kinds in respect of any skill they might learn in the package. However, allowing students to define themselves in respect of this norm depends on the personality and cognitive styles of students, which will regulate the writing activities they actually undergo. An underachiever might consistently take the easy route, for example, and learn nothing. An overconfident student might frequently select the more abstract or more difficult route, thereby increasing confusion and misunderstanding.

So our second design problem was to build a system which sufficiently understands the variety of writing problems students might have to direct their learning, yet gives them control of how they undergo that learning.

Designing For Real Interaction

We were concerned to explore the nature of interaction in hypertext, for we started from the point tha t skills are learned primarily through practice, and so appropriate learning could not come from descriptive


information alone, no mat ter how well constructed. Furthermore, the software must be able to latch on to relevant characteristics of actual student writing: the student must be able to manipulate text on screen so the system can provide particular feedback.

Consequently the system design had to take on board not only the usual problems with navigation, dislocation and s t ructur ing of materials, but also enable the student to interact with the software, ra ther than merely be acted upon by it. Arguably the interactivity of typical hypertext teaching materials is fact oriented, ra ther than procedure oriented, information oriented rather than skills oriented, and interactive only insofar as it allows the user to control information flow, not allowing the user to manipulate the materials themselves or provide new information. Reading skills may well be taught by such a system, but not writing skills.

The questions of whether it is possible to teach skills through hypertext will have to be reserved for another paper. It seems fair to assert, however, that hypertext materials cannot maintain the level of interaction possible in human tutorial. Tutorials are typically a form of loosely structured conversation, whilst hypertext offers, at best, a multiply branching dialogue, and, at worst, an unstructured monologue. When students are told they will get interactive learning they may expect the conversational interaction of tutorial (Thomas and Norman, 1990), but such levels of interaction are impossible without both the user models ITS lack and the discourse unders tand ing Natural Language systems still fail to provide. Other than conversational interaction, skills teaching depends on interaction with materials, so practical activities are important. We might question the extent to which meaningful practice of writing can be carried out by computer, where little specific feedback can typically be offered.

So our third major design problem was to offer interactions which were meaningful for students from which they could acquire skills rather than just knowledge.

THE SOLUTION?

Flex ib le Structure

Our design strategy has been to adapt the philosophies of the LAST system at Connecticut (Van den Berg and Watt, 1990), the Punctuation system of Syracuse University (Smith et al., 1990) and Logica's HITS system (Barden, 1989a, 1989b).

The LAST system constructs a hierarchy of knowledge in frames (equivalent to nodes or cards) connected by emphasised terms (equivalent to buttons or links):

The frames are arranged according to their level of abstraction, forming a logical tree, with abstract frames near the root and with very detailed and concrete frames making up the branches. Anyone seeking information about an emphasised term can

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retrieve increasingly concrete frames by traversing the tree to any depth of detail desired. (Van den Berg and Watt, 1990)

LAST equates abstraction with difficulty and concreteness with ease, offering the student layers of abstraction and generality which s/he can climb or descend at will. Fortunately, our approach to writing teaching is a systematic one, which, though not completely hierarchical in conventional delivery, lends itself well enough to hierarchical shaping by topic. Our first, and major, task therefore was to develop a comprehensive description of the writing topics we wished to cover which could be expressed as a uniform hierarchy.

Part of the topic hierarchy is shown as an example in Figure 1. In principle each parent node in the hierarchy could have any number of children. We have limited this number to four, both to simplify screen design and to constrain the number of options a student has at any point, in order to reduce cognitive overload.

I Audience

I I

Types of audience

I Age

I Objectives

I I

Purposes

I Audience variables

I I

Knowledge

Figure 1. Part of the topic hierarchy

Students can move up and down the hierarchy, gathering information as they desire. This facility provides guided flexibility, offering routes through the knowledge which make sense to the tutor and to the student. Descent of the hierarchy is movement towards detail, towards concrete subtopics, towards the part iculari ty of writing tasks and products. Ascent of the hierarchy is movement towards concepts, principles and ideas, towards the global concerns tha t writers, and writing tutors, have.


This straightforward topic hierarchy, which I refer to as the tree of knowledge, is not quite a complete conceptual breakdown of the topic of writing, for several reasons. The most obvious of these is tha t writing skills probably cannot be analysed into a neat hierarchy of processes and subprocesses. Most of the current system addresses the topics of report writing and technical writing, as these are key areas for our writ ing teaching. We advocate a systematic approach to writing, an approach which can be presented hierarchically, so this has become the t runk of the tree. In some places, therefore, the hierarchy represents pedagogic convenience as much as a 'logic' of writing, but we are not too concerned about the different representations of knowledge which are fudged in representing our materials as a single hierarchy. Its pr imary motivation is not to reveal an arcane lore of writing skills to students, but to systematise the ways they encounter knowledge so tha t they can orient themselves within a mass of material. So we do not believe that writ ing is a single h ie rarchy of knowledge, nor tha t it is wholly appropriate to teach writing as if it was such a hierarchy. Rather, we find sufficient hierarchies within the subject to make it a plausible structure for teaching materials which do not lead to undue distortion.

The sought benefit of developing a uniform approach is ease of access for students, leading to ready understanding of links, at every point in the system. We are prepared to sacrifice a few subtleties for the sake of consistency and a lack of confusion. However, forcing some material into a h ierarchy does lead to occasional artificial constructs, as ways of grouping knowledge about wri t ing are sometimes needed to l ink branches of the tree together. We have not made any new discoveries about writing in trying to create such groupings. Rather we have seen that some of the groupings already in the l i terature are as arbi trary as our own. At its best the tree represents a useful logic of analysis of the problems and skills of writing. At its worst it simply provides lists of topics grouped together as 'aspects of ' some larger more general topic, i.e. a miscellaneous menu structure. Fortunately conceptual consistency is much more evident in the material we have used than the occasional arbi t rary grouping, so there is little danger of students wasting time on topics which have been invented in order to make the system work, or acquiring misleading meta-knowledge of the links between individual topics.

The basic hierarchy is augmented in two ways. Firstly, we allow the s tudent to ignore the tree. An explore button opens up the tree to an intellectual Tarzan, who may leap from branch to branch of the tree, plucking random fruit. The primary function of explore is as a glossary, and a gloss. A student can pick up a key word or phrase in the text and leap to the identified topic, in which case the new topic will always offer the chance of immediate return. However, if the s tudent ignores the return, he or she is able to browse freely across the tree as well as within it. As the entire t ree is always available, and re ta ins its hierarchical s t ructure throughout , if the s tudent becomes 'lost in hyperspace', he or she can always leap back to a known topic, previously visited.

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So the system is at once completely structured and a true network (defined as one in which any node is only one link away from any other node). The student who prefers to trust the authority of the designer need not browse. The browser, who wants to wing it through hyperspace can always find solid ground.

The second augmentation is the notion of views, as suggested by Beaudoin (Beaudoin, 1990). In Beaudoin's system, which teaches punctuation, a student first selects a punctuation mark from a menu, then selects a view of that mark. A view is simply a conceptual 'handle' on tha t punctuat ion mark, an approach. Available views in the Punctuation system are 'Ideas into Language' (which il lustrates how punctuation is used to turn idea fragments into coherent sentences), 'Conventions' (which describes punctuation rules and conventions) and 'Comparison' (which gives the student an unpunctuated version of real text to punctuate, comparing the result with the original).

These three views are thus, roughly speaking, illustration/example, concept and practice. They are quickly learned, are always available and can be applied to whatever punctuat ion mark the student is currently interested in. Students can therefore construct their own paths through the data, concentrating on practical work, or opting simply to receive information, or looking at concepts then illustrations of those concepts, and omitting as many punctuation marks from their study as they like.

We took this idea and generalised it for writing skills. The views our developing system offers are:

• writing concepts (i.e. broadly descriptive material); • writing exercises (i.e. practice); • illustrations and examples, (showing, for example, both good and bad

practice).

These are, in other words, equivalents for the three views in Beaudoin's system. We substituted writing skills topic for punctuation mark, and thereby created an open writing skills environment made up of a list of topics which can be freely selected and each studied through any combination of concepts, practice and i l lustrative example. This augmented structure is shown in Figure 2.

So the topic hierarchy represents the Writing Concepts view. At each level (for each concept), the Writing Exercise view and Illustrations view is also offered. Effectively each node in the topic hierarchy also has a Writing Exercise node and an Illustration node depending from it. Thus the student can, for example, elect to move through a hierarchy made entirely of practical exercises.


Examples

Practice

Description J

ExarnplBs __

Practice ~

D~riptt~n I

ExampIBs --t I Practice__ Audience

Description _ I I

Types of audience

I Obiectives

I I

Purposes

I Audience variables

I

Examples

r Practice

Description

Examples i I Examples

Practice I Age Knowledge Practice

Description I Description

Figure 2. Topic structure for the open learning system

In addition we provide some support information, more or less conventionally for Hypertext, in the form of a glossary and external information. Effectively, a glossary is provided by the explore function. An additional function/button at each node offers ideas. The idea category of information is really a catch-all category, designed primarily to lead the student outside the system. Whilst we believe hypermedia can do many things as well as, or better than, conventional teaching, equally there are features of conventional teaching computers cannot easily provide. There are exercises and activities students can learn from that cannot easily be implemented on a computer (for example, in situations where simulation cannot replace the real experience). There is external information we want students to be aware of which we cannot make available (e.g. because of copyright restrictions). We also want to encourage s tudents to practice and to develop learning strategies beyond those of interacting with a machine. In a sense, one measure of the success of the package will be the extent to which students carry out writing activities which do not employ it.

The ideas function offers activities to students which they can tailor to their own wishes needs and desires, so it leads to a potential flexibility of learning tha t no computer system could t ruly offer. However, there is no surety that any student will carry out any of these actions. The ideas function, therefore, simply points the s tudent towards external activities and information. It acts as a bibliography, an advanced primer and a guide for projects and practical application of what has been learned by using the system.

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We believe a concept map would also be useful, but current ly only provide the complete, nested topic view (which corresponds to the outl ine s t ruc ture of the systematic approach to wri t ing t ha t we advocate). A concept view might go some way to offering other systematic ways into the materials (hence other metaknowledge) than that offered by a strictly hierarchical approach. It would therefore work against some of the defects of the tree-structured approach noted above. However, for reasons outlined below, it may be difficult to offer a map of the actual nodes available to a student, for the system would have to construct the map, so this may be one desirable feature the eventual system lacks.

Structure And Flexibi l i ty

Upon the overall structure of the knowledge tree it is then possible to overlay routes or pat terns through the material, which correspond to part icular needs, abilities or course structures. This is the notion we have adapted from Barden's HITS system. Barden suggests tha t the skills of the domain expert (who constructs the hypertext domain) and the teacher (who selects courses from that material) are different, so should be separated and supported by different components in an au thor ing or course building system. HITS does this, providing intelligent support for the course designer.

We have not sought to build intelligence into our package, except in a very rudimentary sense, but are implementing it so tha t each node in the h ierarchy can be 'disabled'. By disabling nodes (and therefore, effectively, routes) 'narrowed' versions of the mate r ia l s can be constructed. This allows, for example, a tutor to tailor the materials to fit a part icular set of constraints (such as a given number of hours of material, a limited level of abstraction students can go to, a maximum number of practical exercises students can carry out etc.) It will also allow, in principle, students to construct their own courses (based on self analysis) or the system to operate a pretest, which maps out an appropriate route through the materials. For example, if all materials are initially disabled, then a student asked to undergo a diagnostic test, only those nodes would be enabled which the test indicates might be needed.

As yet the inputs to this systematic enabling/disabling have not been determined. Our design includes a 'Configure' card, unavailable to the student, but allowing a tutor to delete nodes form the tree. The system lists all the cards it contains, then removes any a tutor identifies as unwanted. It then checks all the other cards removing all but tons (links) from the remaining cards to those which have been removed. (In fact, the procedure is not quite as described here. The hear t of the design is the 'intelligent button' which knows when it is connected to a node, and ref ra ins from appear ing when it is not). There are approximately 300 nodes in the tree, each of which has three main views plus the explore and ideas functions, giving a potential set of screens in excess of 1500. In fact explore is generally not tailored to specific nodes, but only offers random access to the tree in most cases,


which reduces the current number of screens. At the same time, many of the views include several displays. Practice view, for example, typically contains an 'introduction' screen, a 'main activity' screen and a 'debriefing' screen.

As the system grows it will be important to offer overviews of the material to a tu tor to facilitate effective editing to support different courses. Currently we simply rely on tutor's knowledge of the materials, which is unproblematic as the developers are the only current users. A tu to r new to the system, however, will not know what different exercises offer, what some topics are (e.g. if we choose unusual or ambiguous terminology) or how some areas of the mater ia l are organised. Such a tutor, configuring the system for his or her own courses, therefore needs patience, enthusiasm, trust or guidance.

Being a tree, the task of editing for specific needs is not as arduous as might appear, for disabling a given node can automatical ly disable every other node beneath it, pruning the tree radically. Of course, a tu tor may not wish to remove every sub-topic (e.g. if the mater ia ls desired are remedial support for key areas which are difficult but separate, as in examination revision). In such a case automated pruning must be switched off and the design task does become more arduous. Even so, a tutor familiar with the materials takes no more than fifteen minutes to configure a straightforward course from the 300 nodes. We expect there to be a very substantial saving over tradit ional course preparat ion times even for tutors unfamiliar with the materials and addressing complex needs. At present, however, the system can only offer such tutors simple support, e.g. in using the explore function to examine any random topic in the list when deciding on topics to exclude.

As the selection of nodes is simply the setting of a binary flag for each topic, a t taching a front end to drive the configuration will not be difficult. For example, a pre tes t Hypercard stack which diagnosed s tudent needs through a dialogue; or a stack which analysed the constraints a particular course had to operate within, could output a set of flags which were the inputs to the 'Configure' card. It is through such front ends that we expect to provide the real support for tutors using the system, allowing them to specify their needs, or allowing the s tudent to specify his or her needs, so tha t the tutor has no need to delve into the material structure of the package. Such front ends remain for future projects.

However, systematic rout ing is a built-in principle. When fully implemented, the package will be extremely open and flexible, but tha t openness can be cut down at need. Its approach also should be sufficiently generalisable to enable an 'empty' version of the structure to be created which can read in flat text files (e.g. created by a domain tutor from any discipline) and construct an appropriate knowledge tree. Tutors can then configure the materials created by the subject expert to produce individual courses.

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Meaningful Interaction

To address the third design problem, that of student's expectations of interaction, we trade on existing expectations, in the well-established HCI principle of setting up familiar metaphors. Those metaphors are realised by constructing 'closed' routes through the materials, the closure depending on the selected metaphor, and thus the student's expectation.

We are t rading here on expectations of t radi t ional classroom discourse. The student expectations we are working with are:

• l e c t u r e : the student receives a body of information and is able to ask questions after receiving information. A hypertext equivalent is to 'Click the Query button when you've finished reading', revealing follow-up options. This is realised by conditionally enabling routes through a topic, (e.g. only revealing the links from the current card when the 'I have finished reading' button is clicked).

• t u t o r i a l : the student is required to come prepared with certain set topics in mind, around which discussion and further investigation takes place, in an exploratory way, with the student able to control t h a t discussion within the defined parameters . A hyper text equivalent is to limit browsing to a defined set of subtopics but allow the student to browse any and all of the defined materials freely.

• w o r k s h o p s : the student practices an approach or skill previously encountered intellectually. A hypertext equivalent is to analyse the student's actual writing, and link it to the information available on tha t topic (e.g. having 'discussed' or explored information on readability formulae, the student may type in text for readability analysis). This is realised by enabling the Writ ing Exercises hierarchy, but disabling other links.

• l i b r a r y w o r k : the s tudent chases information on his or her own, collecting and assimilating it for his or her own purposes. Primary motivat ions are to carry out an ass ignment or to follow-up information received from another source, e.g. looking up a reference or consulting a glossary. Standard hypertext equivalents are to offer a glossary, a bibliography, cross links between information sets and indexes or maps of the information. In addition, to train the student in the use of the system as well as its content, the hypertext system can 'set assignments' on information retrieval.

In all these contexts the student comes to the hypertext system with expectations which that system can fulfil and build on. The student need not make use of the metaphor, of course, but in doing so implicitly selects 'classes' on 'topics' tha t s/he desires. By constraining sets of views, the system can realise such metaphors. A particular 'course' or 'class' therefore can be built from the total package by a combination of constraining the topic hierarchy and limiting the available views of topics within that hierarchy.


CONCLUSION

We feel that our strategy, namely building flexible materials that can then be differentially constrained, is the best approach to satisfying multiple needs within a single package. The design addresses each of the problems we have identified. It also appears to be sufficiently general to be usable in contexts other than writing teaching.

However, as yet, the system has not been evaluated, so judgement must be reserved. As an approach to delivering teaching material on writing, we are confident of its success, but detailed evaluation will be needed in order to determine its adequacy for teaching skills. The extent to which it will be useful in wider contexts depends partly on the adequacy with which it addresses a range of different needs (we believe it does have wide application) but also on the support than can be provided for tutors wishing to use the system in very specific contexts.

REFERENCES

Alexander, G. (1989) 'The Thought Box Project: Results of the First Phase', Educational and Training Technology International, 26, 4, pp. 379-392.

Allinson, L. and Hammond, N. (1989) 'A Learn ing Suppor t Environment; the Hitch-Hiker 's Guide' in R. McAleese (ed.) Hypertext: Theory into Practice, Intellect, Blackwells, Oxford.

Arshad, F. N. (1989) 'Knowledge-Based Learning Advisors', Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Technology and Education, Orlando, Florida, March, pp. 213-216.

Barden, R. (1989a) 'Developing a Hypercard-Based Intelligent Training System', Educational and Training Technology International, 26, 4, pp. 361-367.

Barden, R. (1989b) 'HITS: Hypercard Intell igent Training', in N. Will iams Training Agency: Conference for Contractors on the Artificial Intelligence Applications to Learning Programme, March 6- 7, pp. 110-117. Report available from the Training Agency, Moorfoot, Sheffield.

Beaudoin , J. (1990) 'Navigat ion and the P u n c t u a t i o n Tool: Considerations in Hypertext' in Smith et al. 1990, pp. 30-35.

du Boulay, B. and Sloman, A. (1988) 'Bread Today, J am Tomorrow: the Impact of AI on Education', Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Technology and Education, Edinburgh, March, pp. 82-85.

Lidtke, D. K. (1989) 'A Modular Approach to a Tutoring System', Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Technology and Education, Orlando, Florida, March 1989, pp. 116-119.

Ross, D. (1990) 'A Computer-Based Technical Writing Course Using Hypercard ' , paper del ivered to 6th Computers and Writing Conference, Austin, Texas, May.

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Self, J. (1988) 'Realism in Student Modelling', paper delivered to Alvey IKBS research Workshop on Tutoring Systems, University of Exeter, 17th- 18th November.

Smith, C. F., Beaudoin, J., Doty, L. H., Jankiewicz, H., Kirby-Werner, R. and Laudun, J. (1990) Multiple Perspectives: Courseware development Using Hypercard, Syracuse University Writing Program, Research Report #1.

Thomas, P. J., and Norman, M. A. (1990) 'Interacting with Hypertext: Functional Simplicity without Conversational Competence' in R. McAleese and C. Green (eds.) Hypertext: State of the Art, Intellect, Blackwells, Oxford.

Van den Berg, S. and Watt, J. H. (1990) 'Using Structured Hypertext in Teaching: The Effect of Context on Performance and Acceptance'. Paper delivered to the Human Technology Interest Group, International Communication Association for 1990 Annual Convention, Dublin, Ireland.

Waite, A. and Goodman, L. M. (1989)'Computer-Aided Self Assessment: The Intelligent Answer?', Educational and Training Technology International, 26, 4, Nov, pp. 348-360.

Williams, N., Holt, P. and Cashdan, A. (1988) Expert System for Report Writing: A Report to the Manpower Services Commission, available from the Training Agency, Moorfoot, Sheffield.

A hypertext open learning system for writers

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