[Sigia-l] affordances for learning vs teaching

[John Fullerton]

cross-posted to ia-cms, sigia-l, and infodesign cafe

I'm involved in a project that has a user audience of college students
and is supposed to teach them about an academic/library subject (to give
an  example, though not the actual instuctional focus, bibliographic
citation format) and then to evaluate their learning. The approach thus
far has mainly been to offer a few online pages of written information
and then to test with multiple choice or true/false questions. Though
I'm mainly involved in technical support for the project, I'd like to
ask some general questions. I am about to receive training and/or read
books for the main technologies mentioned in the questions (Vignette and
Flash).

Please note that I'm not asking for research or an extensive response;
any responses will be appreciated.

1. How can such a learning application provide for user learning
instead of trying to teach? (The idea of supporting learning instead of
trying to teach was mentioned recently on sigia.)

2. One idea was writing a Flash application that involved interactive
highlighting of text, possibly based on pointing at text in one passage
and highlighting text in another passage. I was thinking of pointing
anywhere within a statement and then highlighting an entire statement in
the other passage. I could find out how to do that with Javascript or
DHTML. Is that kind of highlighting easy to do in Flash? Are there
alternatives to highlighting that may seem more informative? What are
the presentation benefits of Flash in such an application?

3. Are there applications available for Vignette (CMS) that could
easily be used for such instruction/learning? We are already considering
use of Vignette's Survey instrument.

4. Does a combination of Vignette and Flash for the application seem
practical and to be of benefit?

5. Are there any recommended books? For Flash MX I'm thinking of
Moock's ActionScript for Flash MX. For Vignette (as used at my place of
work with Java Server Pages) Bergsten's JavaServer Pages, 2nd Edition.
I've used C before (non-Windows), studied C++, written some JavaScript,
worked on Active Server Page applications.

Have a nice day
John Paul Fullerton
j-fullerton at tamu.edu