Navigation and Visualisation Techniques in eLearning and Internet Research

Abstract

Research into investigating how users navigate through internet and multimedia resources in an educational context has revealed distinct preferences in how they approach the resource, their methods of interrogating it and both the quantity and quality of the information they obtain. Using highly sophisticated software even for digital natives involves learning a series of methods or techniques for easily manoeuvring through the vast quantities of data and developing schemas to do this efficiently and accurately. This chapter analyses methods that have been used for navigating through multimedia packages, explores users’ preferences for navigation and visualisation, investigates design errors in multimedia that prevent good navigation and details newer visualisation methods and navigational tools. The chapter should give educational users a fresh perspective of issues of navigation and visualisation and allow them to develop these techniques in order to improve their use of internet and web resources and teaching materials.