YEUNG Yau Yuen and NG Pun Hon
Department of Science & Mathematics
THE HONG KONG INSTITUTE OF EDUCATION
Background and Objectives
According to Schatz and Hardin (1994), some user-friendly browsing software such as Mosaic, Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer have recently made global hypermedia in form of the World Wide Web (WWW) a widespread reality. In many local institutions, access to the Internet (using Netscape) has become very popular and so it should be very feasible to make use of the hypermedia features in the WWW of the Internet for educational or training purpose as hypermedia can provide some unique learning features to the students such as giving them free choice or direct access to the contents and interconnections within an information domain. The instructional uses of the WWW (Shotsberger, 1996) and that of electronic mail in undergraduate teaching (Pitt, 1996) have recently become foci of educational research on teaching academic subject with multimedia and telecommunication technology (Wiburg, 1994). Although there is currently a computer network called TeleNex (Tsui and Ki, 1994) established at HKU for English language teachers, yet little work of similar nature has been done in Science or other subject areas within the HKIEd.
In the HKIEd, there are several motivating/advantageous factors for using the Internet to teach our Science students:
For this project, we have created a simple WWW home-page design model which consists of five main stages, namely planning, development, implementation, evaluation and refinement. Activities involved in each stage are described briefly in Fig.1. Regarding the learning materials, the outline is given below:
After conversion, these HTML documents are finally uploaded as a World Wide Web (WWW) home-page to an Internet site located at http://www.hkstar.com/~hkiedsci. Science students in various HKIEd campuses are asked to visit our home-page as a part of their learning activities. Questions and feedback could be directed to us via email as provided in the home-page. After visiting our home-page, students are requested to fill in an evaluation questionnaire which is used to collect information on their self-study experience in the Internet and their suggestions for improvement of the home-page. Follow- up analysis will be done to improve our learning materials and the style and contents of our home-page.
Evaluation and Discussion
Even though our project team which consists of a subject matter specialist, an Internet expert and a student helper should be good enough to handle all the stages involved in producing the home-page, yet it is still very vital to have some kind of evaluation to improve/refine our home-page. Based on Mauldin's (1996) experience on evaluating computer-based multimedia programs, we have made some formative evaluation on three major aspects of our hypermedia work:
Concerning the content, several overseas university experts have given via email some encouraging comments to us and pointed out some alternative theories about our topic. Some preliminary findings of the survey indicate that most students consider this mode of learning effective. A great majority of them prefers more self-study topics in the Internet and likes to explore more about Science education in the Internet. A more comprehensive report on the survey will be given in a future paper.
On the other hand, there are of course some limitations and difficulties encountered on using the Internet for teaching. The most fundamental one is the availability of computer and access to the Internet. Another one is that it is more time consuming to prepare the WWW materials because they have to be very detailed for self-learning usage. Despite of this, it is hoped that our present work could serve as a prototype of using hypermedia for science education in self-studying and distant- learning mode in Hong Kong. We also expect our work could help and encourage other Science teachers to write their own home-page on certain topics of Science and link them to our Internet site, gradually building up many pages of a hypermedia science reference book.
Acknowledgement
Financial support from the Hong Kong Institute of Education is gratefully acknowledged. Thanks are also due to Miss Chui Yuet Ying for her assistance.
References
Mauldin, M. (1996) "The Formative Evaluation of Computer-Based Multimedia Programs"
Educational Technology, March - April, pp.36-40.
Muller, N.J. (1995) "The Webmaster's guide to HTML: for advanced Web developers"
McGraw Hill: New York.
Pitt, M. (1996) "The use of electronic mail in undergraduate teaching." British Journal of
Educational Technology, 27(1), pp.45-50.
Schatz, B.R. and Hardin, J.B. (1994) "NCSA Mosaic and the World Wide Web: Global
Hypermedia Protocols for the Internet" Science, 265, pp.895-901.
Shotsberger, P.G. (1996) "Instructional uses of the World Wide Web: Exemplars and
Precautions" Educational Technology, March - April, pp.47-50.
Tsui, A.B.M. and Ki, W.W. (1994) "Where and Whither TeleNex: A computer Network
for English Language Teachers in Hong Kong." Curriculum Forum, 4(1), pp.1-12.
White, B. (1996) "HTML and the art of authorizing for the World Wide Web" Kluwer
Academic Publishers: Boston.
Wiburg, K. (1994) "Teaching Science with Technology: Telecommunications and
Multimedia." The Computing Teacher, April, pp.6-8.
Figure 1: An WWW Home-page Design Model
Stage | Activities |
Planning |
|
Development |
|
Implementation |
|
Evaluation Good Enough? Yes No |
|
Refinement |
|
Table 1: Basic tools for creating home-page
Function | Software/ Internet address |
Image file editor/converter | Lview Pro (gif format) "lviewp1b.zip" ftp://ftp.uoknor.edu/mirrors/simtel/win3/graphics/lviewp1b.zip |
HTML editor |
MS Internet Assistant, SoftQuard HoTMetaL etc. A list of available
HTML editing products: http://www.sinica.edu.tw/www/faq/boutell/htedit.htm |
HTML Manual |
Documents on HTML 2.0, 3.0 and extensions http://www.netscape.com/assist/net_sites
Beginner's guide: |
JavaScript Manual |
Beginner's guide and examples: http://rummelplatz.uni-mannheim.de/~skoch/js/javascr.htm http://home.netscape.com/eng/mozilla/2.0/handbook/javascript/toc.html |
Internet Browser |
Netscape Navigator obtainable by ftp http://home.netscape.com/comprod/mirror/client_down/load.html MS Internet Explorer http://www.microsoft.com/ |
Counting of home-page visit | Web Counter provided by http://www.digits.com/ |
Internet account |
List of Internet Service Provider(ISP) http://www.glink.net.hk/~alexque/hkinternet.html |
Internet Connection |
Trumpet winsock "twsk21f.zip" ftp://ftp.trumpet.com/pub/winsock/twsk21f.zip |