Rethinking 'Interactive' Web Sites for Higher Education

Matthew Allen*
Curtin University of Technology
m_allen@spectrum.curtin.edu.au

Along with the rapidly developing commercial exploitation of the World Wide Web (WWW), there has emerged a generalised, common-sense (and not unreasonable) view that good websites need to be `interactive'. In other words, a 'successful' website is one that, through careful structures of design and use of technologies and applications, offers visitors an active experience, rather than simple passive reading. Interactivity here does not necessarily have a single meaning or process. Rather, I would suggest, it connotes a state of subjective engagement of `being' an audience for a website, rather in the manner that successful television programs create a psycho-cultural dynamic by which viewers experience themselves as `belonging' to those program. The problem, however, is that interactivity is often read or assumed to mean some specific modes of engagement between the site and the visitor, especially by those who are interested in developing new technologies and applications. As a result the concentration is almost exclusively on the idea that the site itself must be interactive, that what the visitor is interacting with are the web pages themselves. Along with the positive value attached to interactivity comes a rather more dismissive approach to other possible modes of engagement.
Now there may well be a good case for assuming this meaning of `interactivity' for commercial sites and of approaching the design and maintenance of sites within that meaning. However the picture is by no means as clear when we consider the use of the WWW for the production of higher education learning opportunities. Not only is the context quite different, bringing into play a different set of objectives for websites, but lecturers and students are not analogous to designers and visitors for the majority of non-educational websites.
To make some progress towards a commonly shared set of values about `successful' educational web design, we need to think again about the underlying concepts that are brought into play when we discuss `interactivity'. We need to relocate interactivity away from the engagement of students with the site itself and see it as a tri-partite relationship between the unit which students are studying (with or through the WWW), the unit's designer/controller and the students themselves.
My paper, which is based on 2 years experience of using the WWW as an integrated component of the critical thinking unit Applied Reasoning 200 at Curtin University, will sketch out some of the fundamental assumptions about the nature of student subjectivity. I raise this issue so as to then explore students' sense of themselves as students, from which we can develop ideas about them as an `active audience' for web-based learning opportunities. In doing so, I will try to lay out the idea that interactivity is not necessarily a cognitive process or behavioural mode, into which students will generally be stimulated or lured through particular web technologies, but rather a mode of `being' that is brought on primarily through their participation in the unit and the understanding of their role within it, in relation to the unit controller and the material which they are studying.
I will conclude that the interactivity we need, to create rich, diverse and effective learning opportunities, is the interactivity of self and other. To this end, interactive technologies might still be useful but they are much less important in the process than the production and maintenance of relationships between staff and students that themselves provide the impetus for interactivity