Interactive History with Learning Affordance for Knowledge Construction in Web-based Learning

The main problem addressed in this paper is how to help learners construct knowledge in exploring existing hypermedia/hypertext based learning resources on the Web. Our approach to this problem is to provide a learning tool, which affords knowledge construction activities involving reflection on the exploration process. In this paper, we describe an interactive history that encourages learners to annotate their exploration history with the reasons why they have explored, which reasons have a great influence on knowledge construction in hyperspace. It also generates a knowledge map from the annotated exploration history, which map spatially represents the semantic relationships among the Web pages explored by the learners. This paper also describes an evaluation with the interactive history system. The results indicate that the system affords rethinking exploration process.