8.1 Guided Tours and Travel Holidays

Hammond and Allison present a system based on the travel holiday metaphor[Ham88] for educational applications. They identify two types of control in learning support environments, namely control over the sequencing of material and control over the sequencing of learning activities as, e.g., reading, taking tests, or solving problems. To minimize the amount of training to use their system, they have built it around a travel holiday metaphor. For inexperienced readers, guided tours offer a means of traveling safely in unknown territory. Sub-tours (excursions) can be embedded into the main guided tour. The system offers other navigational cues such as index, map, quiz and hints for further reading. Readers use this tools while they travel in the document in so called got-it-alone mode.

When evaluating the use of their system, Hammond and Allison found that the readers preferred the tour over all other mechanisms for studying unfamiliar material, but that with increasing familiarity readers shifted to user controlled navigation tools as index and map. Simple guided tours thus seem to be a useful aid for novice or first time users, but are too limiting for experienced readers and need to be complemented by navigation tools that allow the reader to browse more freely. While travel holidays seem to be an appropriate metaphor for learning environments, the next section describes a more generally applicable implementation of guided tours.