INTERACTIVITY AND MULTIMEDIA INTERFACES

Multimedia technology offers instructional designers an unprecedented opportunity to create richly interactive learning environments. With g reater design freedom comes complexity. The standard answer to the pro blems of too much choice, disorientation, and complex navigation is th ought to lie in the way we design the interactivity in a system. Unfor tunately, the theory of interactivity is at an early stage of developm ent. After critiquing the decision cycle model of interaction - the re ceived theory in human computer interaction - I present arguments and observational data to show that humans have several ways of interactin g with their environments which resist accommodation in the decision c ycle model. These additional ways of interacting include: preparing th e environment, maintaining the environment, and reshaping the cognitiv e congeniality of the environment. Understanding how these actions sim plify the computational complexity of our mental processes is the firs t step in designing the right sort of resources and scaffolding necess ary for tractable learner controlled learning environments.