The focus of this issue is the design of usable educational learning environments which are based on the use of modern information and communications technologies. While there are now established traditions of research and development in educational computing and in human-computer interaction (HCI), workers in these areas rarely speak to each other or take note of each others' work: the educational computing literature is littered with naive and simplistic interpretations of interface design issues, and many writers in the HCI literature appear to be unaware of the significant developments that have been made in theories of learning. The premise of a one-day meeting of the British Computer Society HCI Special Interest Group held at King's College London in December 1996, was that these two communities have much to learn from each other, and that a dialogue between them should be fostered. Three papers in this issue are based on presentations given at this meeting. It is hoped that they will provide an impetus for debate about the relationship between usability as interpreted by the HCI community, and learning with information and communication technologies as perceived by the educational computing community.
As information and communications technologies become more and more pervasive, expectations for educational computing are becoming greater and greater. There is an expectation that these technologies will make education available to a much wider audience of learners with diverse backgrounds and ages. For example, the University for Industry, now running as a pilot scheme, will "connect those who want to learn with ways of doing so. It will act as the hub of a brand new learning network, using modern communication technologies to link businesses and individuals to cost effective, accessible and flexible education and training" [1]. In addition, the educational use of computing has always been predicated on an expectation that the nature of learning environments will change through the use of software, with new paradigms emerging for 'interactive learning' based on novel features of emerging technologies. Taken together an increase in the diversity of learners and radical changes in learning tasks present significant challenges for the design of 'usable' educational software. In fact they pose the question: What is usability in the context of modern educational software design?
Contemporary theories of learning are usually expressed in terms of the umbrella concept of 'constructivism' (see for an overview of the salient features of