Giovanni Fulantelli, Italian National Research Council - Institute for Educational and Training Technologies - Via Ugo La Malfa,153, 90146 Palermo, ITALY fulantelli@mail.itdf.pa.cnr.it
Rossella Corrao, Italian National Research Council - Institute for Educational and Training Technologies - Via Ugo La Malfa,153, 90146 Palermo, ITALY rcorrao@mail.itdf.pa.cnr.it
Starting from the analysis of the potential of New Technologies in the Architectural field, with major interest in the educational sector, and considering the limitations of traditional university teaching, we have designed a Web-Based Instruction (WBI) system as a teaching aid in the Italian Faculty of Architecture and Civil Engineering.
The WBI system, which integrates a hypertextual informative network with communication and collaborative tools, presents two important innovative features; firstly, it provides specific tools to manipulate the information contents of the Web pages; secondly, authorised users can modify the information network in the system.
Indeed, the possibility of extending the web-based hypertextual network dynamically gives rise to many research questions, which have been tackled at the design phase.
In this paper we report on the designed Web-Based Instruction system, with the focus on the scalability feature of the system and on the related mechanisms which have been developed.
Even if the system has been designed with a specific application field in mind, the strategies behind it can be easily generalized to other sectors, also outside the field of Education.
For the last few decades the Contemporary Architecture has been unable to activate the necessary processes of real theoretical redefinition which would grant it to acquire a central role in the identification of new design strategies for the 21st century town.
In addition, university teaching at the Italian Faculty of Architecture and Civil Engineering is still too based on courses dealing with different and separate subjects; consequently students experience difficulties to acquire a unitary vision of the knowledge in Architecture and, therefore, to understand the need to integrate the different learnt subjects necessary for the project.
The will to overcome the limitations of the traditional university teaching and the wish to investigate how New Technologies can affect the redefinition of the project in Architecture have promoted the idea of an educational hypermedia system on the Web aimed at facilitating a renewed approach to the Architecture, thus helping in solving the theoretical and technical "impasse" typical of the present architects' work.
Through the hypertext organisation of the information and specific on-line communication tools integrated into the hypermedia system, students can achieve the awareness of the unitary nature of the design process. In fact, the design in Architecture is not only a simple and direct result of the analysis of previous experiences, neither of considerations on specific subjects, rather it needs critical evaluations of the context and of the common "modus operandi". Through the definition of a "virtual design environment" based on New Technologies, we have tried to promote the integration of multi-disciplinary approaches to develop the project in Architecture and the definition of design solutions based on specific contexts; more generally speaking, we have tried to encourage new design strategies in Architecture.
The enormous potential of memory of new technologies, together with their possibility of ringing the changes on a project and of simulating architectural solutions, are extremely effective in representing landscapes, towns, buildings and particular components of them - which need a "critical revision"- in their different contexts. This critical revision can be performed only through the elaboration of an Architectural project. In this way, the benefits arising from the use of the Web complement other advantages which have been demonstrated of using technologies in Architecture and Urban Planning.
The on-line hypermedia system we have designed has been planned to help the teaching in the Italian Faculty of Architecture and Civil Engineering by means of the institution of on-line courses based on subjects related, in particular, to the disciplines that deal with design, history, heritage and town planning.
The system is organized into two virtual working spaces: the "Design Area" and the "Analysis Area"
The Design Area allows students to access a "Virtual Class" where they can actively take part in the on-line courses. Through specific communication tools (e.g. e-mail, chatting, videoconference, and so forth), students elaborate design solutions based on the information collected through the Analysis Area, as well as based on comments and reflections from other remote users, thus enabling cooperative study sessions tutored by remote experts; students can be encouraged to work in teams to plan and develop a common task that, in this specific field, will consist of an architectural project.
In particular, students are guided through the different phases that contribute to the definition of an architectural project: studying technical and in-depth documentation, interacting with peers in order to clarify doubts and plan cooperative activities, contacting experts (the teachers), discussing their design solutions at different stages with experts and peers, comparing their own projects with those of other architects, and so on.
This area does not contain design software, such as CAD software. In fact, the computer-supported design and rendering activities are performed by the students on their computers (or on the computers they can use at university laboratories). Integration and publication of the different projects are guaranteed by the standard format of the resulting files, typical of the CAD packages.
A "Shared Blackboard" and a "Virtual Gallery" have been integrated into the "Design Area" with the communication tools. These tools can specifically promote teaching and learning of Architecture through the Net. In particular, by using these tools, students have the opportunity to publish their projects ("Virtual Gallery") and correct them through the "Shared Blackboard" in which teachers can graphically suggest corrections or design solutions: in this way, students have the opportunity to assess the progress of their own design activity, to reflect on their work and adjust it according to feedback from teachers, tutors and other students.
Students gain access to the Design Area through their Home Page (Fig. 1) corresponding to a personalized access point to the system; from this page, in fact, they can enter the Analysis Area, or have access to all the available communication and working tools. Finally they can read the assignments for the course and find out about new information added to the system by other users (students or experts) from their last connection (new pages in the Analysis Area, new projects in the Virtual Galleries, and so on).
The Analysis Area organizes -in a hypertextual way- architectural and urban information concerning the city of Palermo as a case study. Users can navigate through the Web pages of this part of the system to perform specific research activities.
One of the main purposes of the Analysis Area is to allow users to collect the "external" and "objective" information necessary for the design (data on the town area, the context for a new building, building regulations, administrative laws, formal and bibliography references, and so on).
In order to improve cognitive access to the WBI system, we have designed some "Working tools" that can be used to support flexible and effective study activities. The "Working tools" allow learners to mimic some traditional study activities useful in handling and re-elaborating the information published on the web pages. Specifically, we have focused on some "virtual stationery items" which sustain users attention at high level and develop their critical sense and their abilities to search for, extract and synthesize information in such a way that they can choice from the informative content.
A further important feature of the system is that authorised users can modify the information network. In such a way, not only can users define their own access and research paths through the information, but they can also extend the information network; for example, students can produce new information nodes as the result of research activities performed through the web as well as through more traditional research contexts: libraries, archives, interviews, and so on.
The working tools and the hypertext extension mechanism are introduced in more details in the next two sections.
The "Working tools" enable the user to handle the information in the Analysis Area, to carry out operations on the information pages to maximise the learning process, and to recognise all the phases of knowledge acquisition. Changes to the page content performed with these tools are known only to the user who makes the modification. The philosophy of these tools is, in fact, the provision of a mechanism for individual study strategies. In addition, making private modifications available to all the users could produce a chaotic representation of the information.
The "Page-marker" tool allows users to mark each page of the system they consider relevant to their specific study; a special symbol is added to each marked page. Users can navigate back to the marked pages through the "Iter" tool to study these pages in more detail.
The "Marker" tool allows parts of the text on the pages to be highlighted. The selected parts will remain highlighted all the time users navigate through the system until the end of the on-line module.
The " Note" tool allows user to add notes, reference-marks and other information to the text of a page. The notes, which are for the private use of the user who created them, remain "attached" to the pages from one on-line work session to another. The tool "Iter" highlights the presence of notes on the pages.
The "Note-book" tool works like a real note-book enabling the user to write down reflections, critical notes, and so on: for this reason it represents a collection of writing sheets. The user can access the Note-Book in the Design Area and pass through the different notes taken during the navigation across the Analysis Area.
The "Kit bag" tool represents a kind of catalogue that the users carry with them during navigation through the system, and where they store pieces of information collected on this way around. The pieces of information in the "Kit bag" retain the reference to their original web page; therefore, it is possible for the user to go back to this page, and choose links to other parts of the system. Furthermore, users carry the "Kit bag" with them in the "Design area".
Users can get access to their "Note-book" and "Kit bag " from their home pages in the Design Area, thus avoiding entering the Analysis Area.
One of the most effective tools to help the users navigate through the information is the "Iter" tool: it shows the list of pages visited by the user during each work session or since a date specified by the user. Unlike the "history" tool available in commercial browsers, the "Iter" tool keeps track of the operation performed by the user on the pages through the tools described above. In particular, next to the name of every page, there are symbols to indicate the operation carried out by the user, so s/he may locate the information s/he considered important and return there directly. The system considers a "work session" as the set of operations performed by the user during two consecutive logs to the system.
The operations on the pages foresee a direct click-and-drag interaction on the text (adding a note to the text of a page, marking a string of words, inserting portions of text into the kit bag)(Fig. 2).
It should be noted that some of the described activities could already be performed by using features of the browsers and of the most popular operating systems. However, these solutions are unsatisfactory because the mechanisms are not integrated into a single environment, they are usually separated from the learning context (the informative content of the Web pages) and require a cognitive overload on the part of the learner.
The flexibility of the information network gives rise to important theoretical and technical questions about the parameters which need to be fixed in order to guarantee a consistent growth of an on-line informative hypertextual network and, at the same time, its reliability.
Firstly, it is important to establish who can modify the network. In fact, the Analysis Area is "public", as far as simple access to information is concerned; however, some facilities to operate on pages and modify their content are granted -automatically or with permission- only to some classes of users.
We have distinguished 5 categories of users and foreseen different access privileges for each of them. The first category includes system designers, on-line course tutors and system administrators, who have all the privileges to modify the information network. Then, teachers can control the progress of on-line courses, cooperate closely with the tutors but are not allowed to modify the system without the tutors' and designers' approval; the third category concerns the students, that can access the "working tools" to manipulate the information on the pages and can add new pages and new links too; however, they are not allowed creating new links that modify the structure of the system without the permission of the tutors. Expert guests, the fourth category, can modify substantial parts of the system (only in relation to the contents and the way they are linked); furthermore, they can extend the system through the construction of new pages and links. Finally, the "guest" category includes all the users who wish to consult the system without being entered for the on-line courses; they have no privileges -they cannot use the "working tools" and they have no access to the "Design Area"- and can use only some communication tools associated to the pages (e.g. public chat rooms).
It is important to note that these privileges can be established every time that a new on-line course is started.
A second important question to be considered when designing dynamically scalable hypertext systems is how to define a very precise model of the information domain. We have imposed an a-priori organisation of information, in such a way that new nodes can be immediately classified in any pre-defined category (and added at the right place in the network). This is a condition necessary to guarantee a consistent growth of an on-line informative hypertextual network. It should be noted that a precise and rigorously defined model of the information is not a limit to the hypertext flexibility, rather it represents a "sine-qua-non" condition for its scalability and management
The logical model of the information domain has been structured in such a way as to provide several access paths to the Analysis Area, according to chronological, topographical, or typological criteria.
For this reason, three information categories have been used to classify the hypertext nodes and they divide the information space into three logical sub-domains; each sub-domain corresponds to one of the three access methods, and can therefore be entered through a different index.
Each node is put into a specific class belonging to a category; a single node can be classified according to multiple access criteria and, as a consequence, it can belong to several classes of different categories. For example, a web page describing the state of a building in the 15th century will belong to the class "The town in the 15th century" of the chronological category and to the class "Buildings" of the typology category. In addition, the three sub-domains are transversally linked through the hypertext linking mechanism.
In order to obtain a more refined classification, categories have been in turn divided into sub-categories. When the user enters the system according to one of the three established criteria, s/he navigates to the destination node through categories and sub-categories; eventually the user will select the web page from the class it belongs to. It should be noted that this organization can be modified, in the future, by adding other "sub-categories". According to this structure, information nodes which are added by the users can be easily classified and, consequently, located by other users. In fact, when users create a new page, the system asks them to identify the class (or classes) the new page belongs to. Users can select one or more classes the new page belong to, and the page will be listed in the navigational indexes. Otherwise, the user can ignore classification of the page, which will be automatically linked to the page the user was visiting when the new page was created. In this latter case, the page will not be listed in the indexes, even if it is still classified in the same classes as the original page; it is treated as an appendix page.
The third important question to be addressed (in order to guarantee the consistent growth of the hypertext) is the necessity to impose limits to the extension mechanism, both at information node and link levels In the system designed, we have adopted some specific strategies, strictly based on the information domain model. In particular, information cannot be added directly to existing pages but new web pages can be created by users; in addition, users are not allowed to create new categories or sub-categories, but can only add pages to the classes; in fact, the possibility of modifying the structure of the system is granted only to the system administrators and, under specific circumstances, to the teachers and the expert guests
Particular attention has been paid to the types of links users can add to the system. These constraints have been chosen in such a way as to preserve the original structure of the network, yet allowing people to add new pieces of information: users can add referential and associative links straightforwardly, but are not allowed to add structural links (they must be authorised by the administrators of the system).
Finally, because of the high grade of flexibility of the information network, it is necessary to provide "system known users" with mechanisms showing modifications to the network since their last access. To this aim, each user's Home page highlights the presence of new information added to the system by other users (students or experts) from their last connection (new pages and links in the Analysis Area, new projects in the Virtual Galleries, and so on).
As far as the need to guarantee source reliability is concerned, the system keeps information about each node and link author (including the e-mail address), and makes this information available to all the users (the privileges mechanism guarantees that only system known users can modify the network); consequently, not only is always possible to identify each node's or link's author, but the system users can directly exchange opinions and comments with the authors, thus moving towards a collaboratively developed hypertext.
From an operative point of view, specific tools included in a "License bar" allow users to add new information nodes and referential and associative links in an automatic way, while structural links require prior consent of the system managers. This bar may only be partially accessible depending on the type of user (e.g. it is not accessible for guest users). The creation of the pages by the users only depends on filling in a form that is recalled with a button of the "License bar". The user enters the text, as well as references to images, drawings and movies files into the form that the server will automatically compose into a new web page. After the user has put his/her information in the form, it will be possible to create the links that will lead to other pages of the system. These links will be created with the same procedure using a specific button of the "License bar" (Link button). Finally, when the new page is to be memorized, the server will ask the user which information category, sub-category or class, the new page belongs to.
The implementation of the system is strongly centered on Java ™, both on the client-side and on the server-side. Specifically, Java Applets (extensions of the Java Applet class) are used to host the text and to handle the user interaction; on the server side, the system is managed by a set of Servlets (extensions of the Java class HttpServlet); to be more precise, servlets handle the necessary mechanism to provide personalized pages to each registered users and to log all the user's operations. To this aim, an SQL-compatible Data Base is used to store information about the registered users (login, password, preferences, and so forth), the specific information belonging to each user (references to the file containing the personal notes added during the navigation, references to the information stored into the kit bag, and so on) and information on the modifications that each user has made on each page of the system. In particular, the system stores four different files for each page in the Analysis Area: the html page, containing the page layout, the file containing the pure text, the file of the public attributes (html formatting tags, link tags) and the file of the private attributes (to be more precise, there is one "private" file for each registered user).
Finally, the system architecture is completed by a Web Server, used to deliver html pages to the browser.
The Web-Based Instruction system presented in this paper offers great potential for educational uses. From a methodological point of view, the implementation of the Design Area that mimics a "virtual laboratory" appears to be extremely interesting because it allows students, enrolled for different on-line courses, to develop projects from the same multimedia resources available on the Web, using specific interactive and communication tools integrated in the same work environment, and working in cooperative way. Furthermore, the possibility of extending the information network can improve learning through the construction of knowledge. This real interaction between students and the knowledge representation in the hypertext network is an important point towards a real and significant implementation of the Constructivist theory on the Web, by allowing for the development of personalised in-depth research sections. It should be noted that not only students, but also teachers and expert guests have the possibility of extending the information network, thus allowing them to enrich the content of the system. The privileges accorded to different classes of users prevent guests from arbitrarily adding information to the system.
Finally, it should be noted that, although the system has been aimed at the Architectural field, the strategies behind it can be easily generalized to other sectors. The "Working tools" can be considered as real and general didactic tools for WBI systems, and particular tools can be related to different didactic fields; students can use them to manipulate the information on the pages, to show their results, to communicate with other users of the system and to extend the information net, which are all activities not depending on a specific application field.
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Giovanni Fulantelli and Rossella Corrao, © 1999. The authors assign to Southern Cross University and other educational and non-profit institutions a non-exclusive licence to use this document for personal use and in courses of instruction provided that the article is used in full and this copyright statement is reproduced. The authors also grant a non-exclusive licence to Southern Cross University to publish this document in full on the World Wide Web and on CD-ROM and in printed form with the conference papers and for the document to be published on mirrors on the World Wide Web.
