“"Hyperlectures": Teaching Postmodern Culture on the
Web”
Licia
Calvi
Trinity College Dublin, Eire
One of the major didactic difficulties, regardless of the kind of knowledge that
must be learnt, seems to be that of ensuring a correct "transfer" of information
from the teacher to the learner. This "transfer", as Plato already illustrated,
may be problematic because of what happens in the "head" of the learner,
something which ultimately influences what the learner herself can understand -
see also (Ambroso 1999). In order to guarantee a successful information
transfer, it is therefore necessary that the teacher adopts a series of
strategies taking into account how information is processed by learners.
Cognitive science may help in this respect to shed a new light on how
information is received, processed, stored and ultimately retrieved when facing
real-life situations - see, for instance, (Dix et al. 1993). From these
characteristics, it is indeed possible to draw different learner profiles,
different learning models.
Traditionally, according to van der Veer (1990), the individual characteristics
that HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) takes into account while conceiving
interfaces and user-friendly systems include:
- 1. learners' personality, mainly in terms of introvert or extrovert behaviour;
- 2. the cognitive styles that students follow while learning, either a verbal or a visual style;
- 3. the strategies they exploit for learning, namely a heuristic or systemic procedure;
- 4. finally, the structures they use to represent the knowledge they have acquired. These structures ultimately reflect the different long-term memory modalities employed to process information, i.e., semantic or episodic structures.
- 1. the necessity to adapt information to users, i.e., to provide information according to users' learning needs, level of competence achieved thus far, goals, and preferences, in order to facilitate learning (a user-tailored approach to information presentation);
- 2. the complementary requirement of fostering both textual and conceptual coherence in structuring information;
- 3. the subsequent need to limit, if not to avoid completely, cognitive overload while users process information by appropriately determining the sequences of nodes and links to be consequently shown to users.
References
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