Knowledge at the Crossroads: Some Alternative Futures of Hypertext Learning Environment
Nicholas Constantine Burbules, University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign
Tomas Callister, JR., Whitman College Washington
Summary
Hypertext is a form of informational environment in which ideas are linked to one another in multiple ways. There is an interactive relation between the structure of a text and the strategies of reading hypertext invites.
Traditional text is primarily sequential and linear. It is mainly printed and permanent. References of traditional text exist outside the primary text. On the other hand, hypertext can be of any size, small or big, connected by 'links' that allow the reader to access those other information directly from a given textual starting point through a computer. Hypertext does not have a center, hence any reader is free to make her or his interests the de facto organising center.
Authors of hypertext have decided what to produce with an eye towards how it will fit within a transformed system of reading. Even though it is so, readers also become the authors at the same time. This is because they have to go through reading through the active making of linkages between nodes of a text in the same way authors do. Hence, readers become authors and authors become readers at the same time.
Even though hypertext are flexible, they may prove too unstructured to accommodate the needs of readers and learners. This is so because the links from the hypertexts to other texts may not have an relevance to what the readers or learners require. Due to large amount of information, learners may have a difficult time to decide which information is useful and which is not.
