Estudo sobre coerência na produção de hipertexto didático

Abstract

This work aims to analyze and provide coherence on the teaching hypertext platform "Domus: Brazilian Software for Support to the Building Energy Efficiency Regulation Program", considering technological support and strong virtual insertion. In this way, the hypertext characteristics effects on the coherence have been verified as well as the marks that make hypertext to be considered as a text, but with different specificities of the conventional text, characterizing types of hypertext links and establishing the relationship between the different types of links and coherence factors. For the analysis of hypertexts, coherence has been the key element as it is primarily responsible for the quality of the text. Thus, by considering a course in hypertextual system - indexed to the functions of the Internet and links to return, to reiterate and to go deep in the content - the following coherence factors were correlated: focus, inferences, situationality and contextual factors (centered on the producer), intertextuality (centered on both producer and user) and consistency, relevance and informativeness (centered on the user). Those three last factors have shown more evident due to the fact that coherence will be achieved only if users can establish meaning to what they read. Regarding the hypertextual coherence, three factors were listed that distinguish effectively and impact on the planning and development of hypertext: i) the process of discontinuous text; ii) lack of visible boundaries in the documents and iii) lack of a fixed sequence of the text. These issues can be eased, especially in the case of hypertext teaching, using technological tools such as those used in the graphic organizer, which is a concept map that allows easy orientation and contextualization at both global and local levels. Five types of links (internals, anchors, externals, exclusive externals and hybrids) were found, and coherence in hypertext courseware was very sensitive to the external link, due to both the user difficulty to maintain the relevance of the topics set by the producer in the base text and the uncountable information arranged in a new environment, the web site. In this way, we asserted that the exclusive external link should be used in teaching hypertexts as a search function or as a reference, since the producer cannot manage the paths chosen by a hiper reader, which makes very difficult the production of coherence. Therefore, we believe that the production of coherence in teaching hypertexts can be accomplished even with its peculiarities, requiring the producer takes them into account, establishing links that are, in fact, keywords and the remission of their contents to be consistent to the subject and topic treated in the source hypertext.