A Cognitive Perspective for Designing Multimedia Learning Environments

This paper discusses cognitive and cybernetic theories of human learning and how these can influence the design of multimedia learning environments. We first briefly outline the formalised theories of cognitive flexibility, discourse, activity and conversation from the perspective of the way in which the hypermedia may be semantically structured to facilitate learning. Two instances are then presented: Conceptura, as an environment here being introduced to the literature for adaptive concept visualisation, teaching and assessment in complex domains based on the Conversation Theory of Pask (1975); and InterBook (Brusilovsky, Schwarz & Weber, 1996a) which offers adaptive navigation support in an information space structured through a domain model of pre-requisite and outcome concepts, based on Discourse Theory (Hobbs, 1979; Reichman, 1979; Grosz and Sidner, 1976). Both environments use a network of concepts to represent knowledge about the subject domain, although the implementation and visualisation of this network differs.