Quality and Communicability for Interactive Hypermedia Systems: Concepts and Practices for Design

Citation

Mason, D. (2010), "Quality and Communicability for Interactive Hypermedia Systems: Concepts and Practices for Design", Online Information Review, Vol. 34 No. 6, pp. 988-989. https://doi.org/10.1108/14684521011099496

The ostensible subject of this book is the problem of communication between people and computer‐based applications, but it has to be said that it is difficult to discern a single theme among the disparate topics covered. The book consists of 11 chapters and two substantial appendices looking at various aspects of internet communication.

The stated theme is communication channels, but the metaphor is stretched too thin in many chapters. Some chapters report on conceptual research projects, some report fairly routine projects, and one chapter is a primer on Web 2.0 for beginners. Many of the chapters deal with some aspect of utilising the internet in education. Two describe the experience of using game‐ based learning and simulation to deliver content to students, two describe programming methods, one to help students learn artificial intelligence programming and one on programming methodologies.

Other chapters seem to have little to do with the main theme. One is an interesting update of the 19th century idea that access to libraries is good for society, extending the idea to virtual objects; another reports on an application that is part novel and part database aimed at elaborating on the twentieth century public imagination. Others are more eclectic. There is a treatise on accessibility of websites for the disabled and a comparison of e‐government websites in Argentina.

The strength of the book is the consistent organisation of chapters and the presence of rich referencing sources for each topic. One of the weaknesses is that these are all invited papers and not peer reviewed. While the overall quality is high, some of the conclusions are speculative at best, and not at all in the mainstream of research in this area.

Many chapters have been written by researchers from non‐English backgrounds, and while there is nothing wrong with the research, the standard of English is so grammatically poor that it distracts from the material. These chapters need a thorough revision by someone with English as a native language.

Overall, the book does not gel, and while individual chapters are interesting, the book is little more than a collection of individual articles of variable quality.