Exploring student engagement through classroom use of hypermedia authoring

This paper describes research within the "Fair Go" project, a collaboration between the University of Western Sydney and the Priority Schools Funding Program, a NSW government equity initiative. In this project teachers and teacher educators work as co-researchers with students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds exploring ways to increase the students' substantive engagement in classroom learning. The collaboration described in this paper is focused on the task engagement created as primary student's author interactive hypermedia texts for an intended audience. Also discussed are the linkages between the school based work and the program the teacher educators provide for their university students. The central proposition of this investigation is that student's construction of hypermedia texts deepens their engagement in learning tasks and their understanding of the content knowledge they are representing in that text. The students' attempts to meet the needs of their imagined audience and the interactivities they build into their texts are seen as measures of their ability to represent what it is they know. Data collected thus far supports the following propositions. First, that students can be assisted to construct hypermedia texts that will engage their intended audience through teacher scaffolding of the variations in the structure, content and interactivities within the authored texts. Further, students use of information and communication technologies within appropriate learning sequences will increase their engagement in learning tasks in ways that go beyond the teacher, time and place of classroom learning. Finally that student collaboration, learning initiative, higher order problem solving and use of metalanguage increased in ways not previously reported by the teachers working with these students.