1.0 What is Interactive Learning?

Interactive Learning is a learning approach that incorporates social networking and urban computing into educational courses. Interactive Learning has evolved out of the use of digital technology and virtual communication, particularly by students.

How does this involve hyperlinks? You'll notice that many of our discussions involve ideas like hyperlinking and tagging. This is because interactive websites usually involve these, as well as videos, blogs, and other online formats. It's by using tools like these that a website becomes interactive, and becomes conducive to online communities and interactive learning.

Because our discussions on interactive learning involves many terms from digital technology and virtual communications, we have listed some definitions for you below. In addition, some terms contain links to further information:

Hyperlinking:
In computing a hyperlink (or link) is a reference to further data that the reader can directly follow, or is followed automatically. A hyperlink can lead to an entire document or to a specific element within a document.

Is Hyperlinking a  new concept?

Hypertext: 
Hypertext is text with hyperlinks, that allows a user to store data and create and link fields of information at will and to retrieve data non sequentially.

Tagging: 
In computing, a tag is a keyword or term assigned to a piece of information (such as an Internet bookmark, digital image, or computer file.) This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching.

Examples of tagging can be seen in Wesch's video on the page The Evolution of Language


Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs):
A VLE is a online space in which students interact with a set of equivalent virtual concepts for homework clubs, classes, tests, classrooms, etc. These online worlds may even extend to include online extensions of libraries, museums, schools, and other academic resources.  

VLEs are discussed in more depth on the page Exploratory Learning - Part 2  


Next Page: Examples of Interactive Websites