CISE Research Instrumentation: Collaborative Hypermedia

9818309

Bieber, Michael P.

Fjermestad, Jerry

New Jersey Institute of Technology

Collaborative Hypermedia

This research instrumentation enables research projects in:

- Automatically Supplementing Computer Applications with Hypermedia,

- Studies of Distributed Multimedia Support for Group Collaboration,

- Virtual Classroom Leading to a Virtual University, and

- Collaborative Knowledge Networking.

To support the aforementioned projects, this award contributes to the purchase of multimedia development and group support environments and experimentation workstations, an NT server, notebook portable computers for demonstrations projectors, authoring devices and software, for building the instrumentation infrastructure for conducting the necessary experimental research cited above at New Jersey Institute of Technology, Schools of Computer Science and Liberal Arts and School of Management. The first project will develop a hypermedia engine to automatically generate hypermedia links and navigation. This approach contributes especially by serving systems which dynamically generate their display contents, the most

common case in business and engineering analysis applications. The second project will develop theory, tools and techniques for distributed decision support utilizing the World Wide Web. This project is an integrated program of theory building, software tool development and assessment, and empirical studies (both controlled experiments and field studies). The third project extends the existing Virtual Classroom program to produce a 'Virtual University.' Research components include semi-structured interviews with faculty and selected students, and field experiments to isolate the influence of specific factors on outcomes. The last project will develop a set of powerful tools designed to support learning communities. The tools will be pilot tested with classes of graduate students, refined, and assessed further through field trials with professional societies and other scholarly communities. The equipment will create a development lab and two

experimentation labs for these projects.