Working with Interactive Articles

About Interactive Articles.  We talked this, but never really did it. Articles were always static, and the users of the articles were responsible for working with them to determine how they applied.   Like the mention of Engelbart, who we talked with on this.  A nice piece worth looking at.

Communicating with Interactive Articles
Examining the design of interactive articles by synthesizing theory from disciplines such as education, journalism, and visualization.

Computing has changed how people communicate. The transmission of news, messages, and ideas is instant. Anyone’s voice can be heard. In fact, access to digital communication technologies such as the Internet is so fundamental to daily life that their disruption by government is condemned by the United Nations Human Rights Council 

. But while the technology to distribute our ideas has grown in leaps and bounds, the interfaces have remained largely the same.

Parallel to the development of the internet, researchers like Alan Kay and Douglas Englebart worked to build technology that would empower individuals and enhance cognition. Kay imagined the Dynabook 

 in the hands of children across the world. Englebart, while best remembered for his “mother of all demos,” was more interested in the ability of computation to augment human intellect 

. Neal Stephenson wrote speculative fiction that imagined interactive paper that could display videos and interfaces, and books that could teach and respond to their readers   ... "