Elaborating Arguments: Writing, Learning, and Reasoning in a Hypertext Based Environment for Authoring

The topic of this workshop focused on the applications of hypertext/hypermedia for learning. Addressing research on hypertext this way raises a classical question of designing instructional material: What kinds of tools and concepts of learning do the authors have for preparing material to be used in the learning situation? This question is especially relevant for the construction of computer-based learning environments where the learner is confronted with the kind of tutoring or coaching situation found in intelligent tutoring systems [1,2,3]. In any case, we consider the learning situation as one where the author of the material wants to communicate knowledge about a given subject. While publishing is a means of communicating knowledge. writing is the activity of producing knowledge. Authors working on a subject start with some initial ideas, formulate and reformulate their ideas and their wording, retrieve and incorporate related work, design, compose and redesign documents in a nested, cyclic publishing process. With hypermedia we consider a learning situation where the learning material is not a printed book or a standard computer-assisted instruction program. Hypermedia offers innovative ways for designing learning materials as well as interactive learning situations. Two main features of hypertext — machine supported links and interactive branching facilities [4]— introduce the kind of interactivity for which instructional authors have been waiting for a long time. The resulting learning materials constitute a special category of hyperdocuments. But qualitative new products demand innovative tools. In this paper, we discuss the design of tools which support authors in the process of creating hyperdocuments in a cognitively adequate way. Our approach addresses the new kinds of final products as well as the situation for creating and learning from these new products.