Untitled - witz cultural

280HYPERTEXT 3.0Experience of teaching with various kinds of hypertext demonstratesthat its intrinsic capacity to join varying materials creates a learning environment in which materials supporting separate courses exist in closer relationshipto one another than is possible with conventional educationaltechnology. As students read through materials for one English course, theyencounter those supporting others and thereby perceive relationships amongcourses and disciolines.Learning the Culture ofa DisciplineHypertext also offers a means of experiencing the way a subjectexpert makes connections and formulates inquiries. Oneofthe great strengths ofhypertext lies in its capacity to uselinking to model the kinds of connections that experts in aparticular field make. By exploring such links, students benefit from theexperience of experts in a field without being confined by them, as studentswould be in a workbook or book approach.Hypertext thus provides novices with a means of quickly and easily learningthe culture of a discipline. From the fact that hypertext materials providethe student with a means of experiencing the way an expert works in an individual discipline itfollows that such abody of electronicallylinked material alsoprovides the student with an efficient means of learning the vocabulary strategies,and other aspects of a discipline that constitute its particular culture.The capacity of hypertext to inculcate the novice with the culture of a specificdiscipline and subject might suggest that this new information mediumhas an almost totalitarian capacity to model encounters with texts. The intrinsicallyantihierarchical nature of hlpertext, however, undercuts such possibilitiesand makes it a means of efficiently adapting the materials to individualneeds. A body of hypertext materials functions as a customized electroniclibrary that makes available materials as they are needed and not, as lecturesand other forms of scheduled presentation of necessity must often do, justwhen the schedule permits.The infinitely adaptable nature of this information technology also providesstudents a way of working up to their abilities by providing access tosophisticated, advanced materials. Considered as an educational medium,hypertext also permits the student to encounter a range of materials that varyin terms of difficulty, because authors no longer have to pitch their materialsto single levels of experlise and difficulty. Students, even novice students, whowish to explore individual topics in more depth therefore have the opportunityof following their curiosity and inclination as far as they wish. At the