Making Exploration History Interactive for Web-based Learning

The main problem addressed in this paper is how to help learners reflect on knowledge that they have constructed in exploring existing hypermedia/hypertext based learning resources on the Web. Our approach to this problem is to provide each learner with a kind of reflection support proper to his/her 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, which spatially represents the semantic relationships among the WWW pages visited by the learners. This paper also describes a preliminary analysis and evaluation with the interactive history system. The results indicate that the system facilitates a rethink on exploration processes, and that the system produces good effects on learning such as integrating the contents of some nodes in more complicated hyperspace.