[quoting Hannafin, 29 May 96.b] Some references might be helpful in framing our work:
I've read much of this (or representative equivalents). However, I note that they are mostly oriented towards instruction. If the designed environment itself doesn't provide the structure, the instructor designs an activity that then is the basis for organizing information exploration around.
It occurs to me that when you "know" where the learner's coming from, since you designed the learning activity that makes the information meaningful, it is "relatively" easy to design the support environment. For self-learners, however, how do you support their task? You may not know "what" is driving them to want to know about, say, behavioral psychology. Is it a generalized interest in learning that started from a cognitive approach? Or are they coming at it from a neural interest? Perhaps in search of sociological behavior adaptation methods? To help in teaching? To train dogs? To further the field? How do you, then, design your OELE?
Where do you start? If you view knowledge as a connected ball of concepts (as Kathy Fisher has with her SemNet product), you realize that any presentation will linearise it with some bias. Even if you support multiple forms of browsing, you want to provide some support. Can you anticipate the desires of people coming at it? Do you come up with some templates of users that have attached structure? Or do you rather try to provide a powerful suite of navigation tools and assume the user can extract the structure "they" desire?
I realize that this is no different from what the author of a book might do (though there always seems to be a market for new twists: Intro to Ed Tech, Ed Tech for Computer Scientists, Ed Tech for Educators, Ed Tech for "Suits," Ed Tech for Politicians, Ed Tech for Idiots, etc., could all be on the shelves soon or already), but is the role for an OELE to accommodate all? Is the scope to be covered part of the requirement specification? I would assume that the scaffolding provided would be based upon an assessment of the learner.
I'm just trying to come to grips with the concept of an OELE, and attempting to come up with a concrete example. When I do, I come up against questions like the above.