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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