EVALUATING CREATING ELECTRONIC RESOURCES

Evaluating Creating Electronic Resources

Evaluating Creating Electronic Resources

An information need may often be expressed in the form of keywords describing topics, for example: “I need information on business models appropriate to e-commerce”. However, an information need requires further parameters which may be - indeed often are - inferred by human search intermediaries. But if we infer them, we must ignore neither their importance, nor the possibility that our inferences may be incorrect. Notably within medicine, techniques have been developed to make explicit certain parameters of information which may otherwise remain unexpressed (e.g. Snowball, 1997). However, such parameters as developed in medicine are essentially problem-based - i.e. referenced objectively in relation to the problem, and external to the user - as opposed to parameters referenced to learner differences. The parameters shown in the model and discussed here are different in that they relate intimately to aspects of the individual learner's mental processing and mental states.

The nature of information needs, and the reverse side of that coin, of relevance judgments, is affected by differences in the types of information processing in which individuals are engaged, and by differences in the strategic and stylistic approaches they adopt in relation to particular tasks. These may be influenced not only by the nature of the task, but by mental states relating, for example, to motivation, anxiety, and levels of existing knowledge and experience. Differences in the characteristics of different individuals in relation to these variables may be thought of as constituting templates - different for each individual, and subject to development over time - through which different learners perceive their “information needs” and judge “relevance” as they seek, select and use information.

Such templates change as learning develops with the acquisition of new information. The same information may be viewed very differently via changed templates as learning progresses. Information not relevant at one point in time may become so at another. Information may also be relevant in different ways at different points in time. For example, fine detail may not be relevant during the initial stages of a holist learner's information seeking and relevance judging, but may be highly relevant to the serialist learner at the same chronological stage of his or her project. A number of researchers have explored information seeking in terms of changes in knowledge states over time, and have utilised relatively sophisticated conceptions of relevance as multifaceted and dynamically changing across successive searches (e.g. Cole, 1996, 1999).

The basic processes of learning entail the successful enmeshing of new information with existing knowledge and the building of new concepts on the basis of other, already understood concepts. Thus, an essential parameter of information need is that new information be presented in a cognitively ergonomic way (Ford, 1995) such that the learner possesses, or is readily able to acquire, understanding of the basic concepts an author or educator assumes to be already understood, and on which s/he builds the further understanding that constitutes the intended learning content of an information ...