Examples of Good and Bad Hypermedia

Good Example - popurls.com

Popurls.com is a news mega-aggregation site where the most shared items from popular news and social media sites are categorized and listed.

Screen shot from www.popurls.com taken on Sept 13, 2011

There is some nodal organization: information sources are the categories and the most frequently shared stories (videos, text, images) are the items contained within.  There is no script or order for which links I follow, though clicking on any one story usually leads to my finding a new cluster of stories to check out.  Though clicking on a link generally opens a new window that navigates out of popurl's domain, I often find myself going back to the popurls site when I am ready to start down a new path of link clicking and reading. That to me is an indicator of good hypermedia design.

Bad Example - Buying a Car Webquest

I feel bad criticizing this teacher's attempt from 2004-2005 to create a webquest. Creating "webquests" for students became very popular as web-publishing became more accessible to teachers.  However, as you will see on the page that though the teacher provides links to other sites within the organization of the activity, students would have to progress through in a very linear way.  If the main goal is to buy a car, then a better way to have presented this information may have been to create categories and links and then let students attempt to come up with a proposal for how they would buy the car. While the scaffolding that was presented is helpful, I believe that similar support can be provided in a less linear way.