Map-Based Horizontal Navigation in Educational Hypertext

The paper discusses the problem of horizontal (non-hierarchical) navigation in modern educational courseware. It considers why horizontal links disappear, how to support horizontal navigation in modern hyper-courseware, and looks at our earlier attempts to provide horizontal navigation in Web-based electronic textbooks. Map-based navigation -- a new approach to support horizontal navigation in open corpus educational courseware -- which we are currently investigating, is presented. We describe the mechanism behind this approach, present a system, KnowledgeSea, that implements this approach, and provide some results from a classroom study of this system.