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285RECONFIGURINGLITERARYEDUCATIONchronous communication among group members" (39). As the examplefrom Heywood's course shows, hypertext systems also support this "asynchronouscommunication" between students and chronologically orderedmodular components of the course.The way that hypertext frees learners from constraints of scheduling withoutdestroying the structure and coherence of a course appears in more impressionisticobservations reported by members of both biology and Englishcourses. One of Heywood's students described working with hypertext asproviding something like the experience of studying for a final examinationevery week, by which, he explained that he meant that each week, as studentsencountered a new topic, they discovered they were rearranging and reintegratingthe materials they had already learned, an experience that previouslythey had encountered only during preparations for major examinations.English students similarly contrasted their integrative experience of coursereadings with those ofacquaintances in sections ofthe survey course that hadnot used hypermedia. The English students, for example, expressed surprisethat whereas they placed each new poem or novel within the context ofthoseread previously as a matter of course-considering, say, the relation of GreatExpectations to "Tintern Abbey" and "The Vanity of Human Wishes" as wellas to Pride ond Prejudice and Gulliver's Travels-their friends in other sectionsassumed that, once a week was over, one should set aside the reading for thatweek until the final exam. In fact, students in other sections apparentlyexpressed surprise that my students wanted to make all these connections.A second form of asynchronous communication involves the creation byhypertext of a course memory that reaches beyond a single semester. Galegherand Kraut propose that "technologies that allow users to observe each otherkcontributions (such as computer conferences and hypermedia systems) mayprovide a system for sustaining group memory independent of the presenceof specific individuals in an organization" (15). The contributions of individualstudent (and faculty; reader-authors, which automatically turn Intermediaand its Web-based descendants into fully collaborative learning environments,remain on the system for future students to read, quote, and argueagainst. Students in my literature courses encounter essays and readingquestions by at least a dozen groups of students from earlier years plus bystudents at other universities whose work they or their instructors submitted.Coming upon materials created by other students, some of whom one mayknow or whose name one recognizes, serves to convince them that they arein a verv different. more active kind of learnins situation. As we shall also