Untitled - witz cultural

282HYPERTEXT 3.0 students anywhere potentially to benefit from materials created at any participatinginstitution.The very strengths of hypertext that make it work so well in conventionaleducational settings also makes it the perfect means of informing, assisting,and inspiring the unconventional student. Because it encourages students tochoose their own reading paths, hypertext provides the individualistic learnerwith the perfect means for exploration and enrichment of particular areas ofstudy. By permitring one to move from relatively familiar areas to less familiarones, a hypertext corpus encourages the autodidact, the resumed educationstudent, and the student with little access to instructors to get in the habitof making precisely those kinds of connections that constitute such an importantpart of the liberally educated mind today so necessary in governmentand business. At the same time the manner in which hypertext places the distantlearner in the virtual presence of many instructors both disperses theresources they have created in a particularly effective manner and allows theindividual access to some of the major benefits of an institutional affiliationwithout the cost to either parfy in terms of time and money.The World Wide Web has enabled the rapid development of a widespread,if all but unnoticed, form of distant learning. With good reason, attention hasbeen paid to the use of the Web for distant learning courses offered by bothconventional tertiary institutions and those, such as the Open Universities ofthe United Kingdom and Catalonia, dedicated to distant learning. Meanwhile,secondary and tertiary students have quietly used the Web with or without theknowledge of their instructors. I first became aware of this phenomenonafter I began to receive e-mail thanking me for my Victoian and Postcolonialsites from undergraduates, postgraduate students, instructors, and even provostsof institutions from Europe, Asia, Australia, and the Americas. At thesame time, contributions to the sites by students as well as faculty from allthese areas continue to arrive. These distant students-distant, that is, to theweb servers in New York and Singapore and to the university where I am paidto teach-came to the sites by different routes: some have been assigned touse them by their instructors, others have followed recommendations by theministries of education in France and Sweden, National Endowment for theHumanities (NEH), the BBC, or groups representing individual disciplines,such as history art history and the sciences; yet others discovered them byusing popular search engines. This kind of use of these sites, which nowreceive 15 million hits/month, suggests several things. First of all, whileexperts in distance education have been understandably concentrating the use