Visual representations for students' learning processes in internet tasks

Navigating the Internet seems like visiting a vast shopping mall: innumerable types of information, in a large variety of containers and in many different locations, are available in one place. An Internet learning task presents an extremely complex networked environment with numerous hyperlinks, nodes, sites, information formats with limited regulation. In this environment it is difficult to interpret the learners' learning sequences and capture the cognitive components as they sift through alternatives. In this paper we advance a method to visually and quantitatively represent and analyse learner activities as they work on an Internet task that requires them to search for information that is unfamiliar. The method visually and quantitatively represents the depth of navigation patterns, the information sources used, the modes of representations used by the students, the patterns and choices they employ as they construct artefacts. We apply the methodology to a sample of students from a Singaporean secondary school working on an inquiry-based task. Data was collected with an unobtrusive screen capture, audit trail and audio recording software application.