Untitled - witz cultural

273RECONFIGURINGLITERARYEDUCATIONappears in descriptions of it from its earliest days. Writing of Bush, Englebart,Nelson, and other pioneers of hypertext, fohn L. Leggett and membersof his team at the Hypermedia Lab at the University of Texas point out that"the revolutionary content oftheir ideas was, and continues to be, the extentto which these systems engage the user as an active participant in interactionswith information" ("Hypertext for Learning," 2.1), Students making useof hypertext systems participate actively in two related ways: they act asreader-authors both by choosing individual paths through linked primaryand secondary texts and by adding texts and links to the docuverse.lNow that more than a decade and a half has passed since I began teachingwith hypertext-and a decade since I completed the typescript of the firstversion of this book-Ican see that hypertext has been used in four ways'One cannot accurately term them stages since several coincided with eachother, and all continue in use today on the Web. Starting with Intermedia,read-only hypermedia helped students acquire both information and habitsof thinking critically in terms of multiple approaches or causes. These firsttwo uses or results represent the effects of employing an information mediumbased on connections to help students develop the habit of making connections.Next, almost immediately we discovered that Intermedia, which provideda participatory reading-and-writing environment, empowered studentsby placing them within-ratherthan outside-the world of research andscholarly debate. Finally, writing hypermedia enabled students to explore andcreate new modes of discourse appropriate for the kind of reading and writingwe shall do increasingly in e-space, the writing necessary for the twentyfirstcentury. In the first version of this book, by necessity I cited materialschiefly available only on Intermedia at Brown. Because many of these webshave now moved into other systems, I shall use examples easily accessible toreaders, choosing, whenever possible, either materials published in Storyspaceor other environments or available on the Web.Al1 these effects or applications encourage and even demand an activestudent. The ways in which hypertext does so leads writers on the mediumlike David H. Jonassen and R. Scott Grabinger to urge that "hypermedialearning systems will place more responsibility on the learner for accessing,sequencing and deriving meaning from the information." Unlike users of"most information systems, hypermedia users must be mentally active whileinteracting with the information" ("Problems and Issuesi 4).From this emphasis on the active reader follows a conception of an active,constructivist learner and an assumption that, in the words of Philippe C.Duchastel, "hypermedia systems should be viewed not principally as teach-