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276HYPERTEXT 3.0 rials than has existed before. One of the greatest problems in course developmentlies in the fact that it takes such a long time and that the materialsdeveloped, however pioneering or brilliant, rarely transfer to another teacher'scourse because they rarely match that other teacher's needs exactly. Similarly,teachers often expend time and energy developing materials potentially usefirlin more than one course that they teach but do not use the materials becausethe time necessary for adaptation is lacking. These two problems, which allteachers face, derive from the classic, fundamental problem with hierarchicaldata structures that was Vannevar Bush's point of departure when he proposedthe memex. A hypertext coqpus, which is a descendant of the memex,allows a more efficient means of preserving the products of past endeavorsbecause it requires so much less effort to select and reorganize them. It alsoencourages integrating all one's teaching, so that one's efforts function synergistically.A hypermedia corpus, such as a website, has the potential to preserveand make easily available one's past efforts as well as those of others.Hypertext obviously provides us with a far more convenient and efficientmeans than has previously existed of teaching courses in a single disciplinethat need the support of other disciplines. As I discovered in my encounterwith the nuclear arms materials, which I discussed in chapter 4, this educationaltechnology permits teachers to teach in the virtual presence of otherteachers and other subsections of their own discipline or other closely relateddisciplines. Thus, someone teaching a plant-cell biology course can drawupon the materials created by courses in very closely related fields, such asanimal-cell biology, as well as slightly more distant ones, such as chemistryand biochemistry. Similarly, someone teaching an English course that concentrateson literary technique ofthe nineteenth-century novel can nonethelessdraw upon relevant materials in political, social, urban, technological,and religious history. All ofus try to allude to such aspects ofcontext, but thelimitations of time and the need to cover the central concerns of the courseoften leave students with a decontextualized, distorted view.Inevitably, the Web and other forms of hypertext give us a far more efficientmeans than has previously existed of teaching interdisciplinary courses,of doing, that is, which almost by definition "shouldn't be done." (When mostdeparlmental and university administrators are not applying for fundingfrom external agencies, they use the term interdisciplinary to meanlittle morethan "that which should not be done" or "that for which there is no money."After all, putting together biology and chemistry to study the chemistry oforganisms is not interdisciplinary; it is the subject of a separate disciplinecalled biochemistry.) Interdisciplinary teaching no longer has its earlier