The initial version of TIP was created in 1992 when I was a National Research Council research associate at the Army Research Institute in Alexandia, Va. The idea was to see if hypertext could be used as tool to explore learning theories. Keep in mind this was pre-WWW, so the value of hyperlinks was not so obvious at the time. This work was done in collaboration with Drs. Robert Seidel and O.K. Park,
The first version of TIP was developed for MS-DOS using the Hyperties system from Cognetics Corp. A subsequent version of TIP was developed in CD-ROM form using HyperCard for the Macintosh; this version contained video clips included in the original WWW version which was implemented in 1994. In 2001, the files were moved from their long-time home on the GWU server to the psychology.org web site (thanks to JSU/Don Walters for hosting them since that time). Unfortunately in moving the files from the GWU server, all the video clips were lost, so the current version is less multimedia in nature than the original.
Various individuals have made suggestions for additions/chances to the pages on specific theories; I have tried to acknowledge their assistance directly in those pages. I want to thank Richard Breen for his help cleaning up the files in 1999 and Mike McKim for updating some broken links in March 2001.
In early 2003, I added more web links and the “Relevant Web Sites” section to most of the theories. Of course, some of these links will be dead by the time you try them, but if you let me know about it, I’ll try to fix them. A number of broken links were updated in 2005 thanks to Nicolette Zuijdervelt.
If you have any suggestions for the TIP pages/web, please email them to me at: gkearsley@sprynet.com.