Using paths in the classroom: Experiences and adaptations

Walden's Paths was designed to enable teachers to collect, organize, and annotate Web-based information for presentation to their students. Experiences with the use of Walden's Paths in high-school classrooms have identified four needs/issues: (1) better support for the gradual authoring of paths by teachers, (2) support for student authoring of paths including the ability for students to collaborate on paths, (3) more obvious distinction between content of the original source materials and that added by the path author, and (4) support for maintaining paths over an evolving set of source documents. These observed needs have driven the development of new versions of Walden's Paths. Additionally, the experiences with path authoring have led to a conceptualization of meta-documents, documents whose components include complete documents, as a general domain where issues of collaboration, intellectual property, and maintenance are decidedly different from traditional document publication.

Using paths in the classroom: Experiences and adaptations Conference Paper