Creating Educational Guided Paths over the World-Wide Web

The World-Wide Web has the potential to support education through access to extensive and encyclopedic materials. The materials must be tailored and contextualized to promote the instructional goals. To provide this contextualization, we have applied the concept of a guided path, an ordered list of pages independent of the existing Web structure. Besides creating the structure, a teacher may annotate the individual pages of a path to provide transition, emphasis, and missing explanation. In addition, some limited interactivity and control over the display of remote information is possible in our prototype path server. This prototype, called Walden’s Paths, works with existing Web browsers and servers allowing its integration into an educational setting with existing hardware and software.