3) they developed generalizable skills such as taking notes, finding information, coordinating their work with other team members, writing interpretations, and designing presentations.
The Highly Interactive Computing Environments( HI-CE) Group at the University of Michigan has developed a multimedia composition tool called MediaText( Hays, Weingard, Guzdial, Jackson, Boyle, & Soloway, 1994). They believe that rather than using media to deliver instruction to learners, learners should use the media to generate their own instruction, and in so doing, learn more about the content. The HI-CE group has studied high school students creating MediaText stories, biographies, or instructional aids, as well as multimedia essays. Students have learned to use techniques such as mentioning, directives, titling, and juxtaposition in their documents. They have found that as students ' experiences with MediaText increase, their documents become more integrated rather than merely annotated text. Students have been very enthusiastic about being " constructionists "( Papert, 1993), believing that they are learning more because they understand the ideas better.
The ACCESS( American Culture in Context: Enrichment for Secondary Schools) Project( Spoehr, 1994; Spoehr & Shapiro, 1991) focuses on the subjects commonly taught in high school, such as United States History, American Literature, and American Studies. The project began with teachers assembling a collection of textual, pictorial, audio, and video materials to supplement their courses. Initially, students simply used the materials for information retrieval. Students who made more extensive use of the conceptual organization built into the system benefited more than the students who used the system like a linear electronic book. Eventually, the project orientation shifted from teacher-created hypermedia materials to student-generated hypermedia documents. To make it easier for students to create interactive projects, the ACCESS user interface was improved. Students produce several small hypermedia documents of increasing size and complexity early in the school year to become familiar with the authoring process. Later, they generally take on one or more major research projects.
According to Spoehr( 1994), the structures that students impose on their hypermedia knowledge vary. A few students( 5- 10 %) typically underutilize the power of the programs and use a linear format( i. e., one overview card followed by a linear series of screens). Most students produce more interesting organizational types, including the " star " in which the entry point is an overview containing buttons to two or more sub-topics, each of which appears as a linear sequence, and the " tree " in which one or more main branches off the initial overview in the program are subdivided into further sub-topics which are then organized as linear sequences or divided into sub-sub-topics. Students utilizing the " tree " organization( about 25 % of the students) generally show more sophisticated understanding of the topic than students using the " star " structure.
There are many ways that the ACCESS Project students appear to benefit from their experiences as interactive authors, most of which fall into the category of superior knowledge representation and higher-order thinking skills. Spoehr
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