HELP! * GREEN=global GREY=local Global HTML version of Foils prepared December 2,95

Foil 14 What is Natural Information Unit -- I?

From Technologies and Issues for Virtual University HPDC95/SC95 Tutorials -- August 1/Dec 4 1995. by Geoffrey C. Fox * See also color IMAGE

Currently we teach and learn using lectures supported by books (and scruffy equivalents such as xeroxed notes) as well as presentations in form of bulleted itemized summary lists
Hyperlinks make "sequential" books very unnatural.
Further computers are not very good at flipping sequentially through electronic pages -- I can beat computer flipping paper book!
Thus one can suggest that (electronic) encyclopedia is a better model so that Encyclopedia Galactica is natural abstraction for the Web
  • my children prefer Encyclopedias to electronic books on CDROM
This suggests that Web Information should be produced in short hyperlinked modules as in Encyclopedia articles


Northeast Parallel Architectures Center, Syracuse University, npac@npac.syr.edu

If you have any comments about this server, send e-mail to webmaster@npac.syr.edu.

Page produced by wwwfoil on Tue Feb 18 1997