Untitled - witz cultural

291RECONFIGURINGLITERARYEDUCATIONEach week, when the question sets arrive, I respond to them by returne-mail, often adding interlinear comments, after which I place the readingquestion in a previously prepared template, and upload it to the relevant sectionof the website. Starting with the second week of the course, I teach theclass HTML tags that create paragraphs, indented passages, and variousforms of emphasis, so after the first few weeks the students become HTML"experts" and I have to do little formatting. When and if students ask, I alsoteach them how to make links, because some of them wish to refer to discussionquestions from previous weeks or other material on the site. Thesequestion sets remain online after the course ends, and the fact that studentswho come after them might read their work, like the fact the site is public,provides student-authors with a crucial sense that they are writing for anaudience and that they are engaged in collaborative learning.Al1 texts on a hypertext system potentially support, comment on, and collaboratewith one another. Once placed within a hypertext environment, a documentcreated by a student no longer exists alone. It always exists in relationto other documents in a way that a book or printed document never does andnever can. From this follow two corollaries' First, any document placed on anetworked system that supports electronicallylinked materials potentiallyexistsin collaboration with any and all other documents on that system. Second,any document elechonicahlinkedto any other document collaborates with it.sTo create a document or a link in hypertext is to collaborate with all thosewho have used it previously and will use it in the future. The essential connectivityof the medium encourages and demands collaboration' By makingeach document in the docuverse exist as part of a larger structure, hypertextplaces each document in what one can term the virtuol presence of all previouslycreated documents and their creators. This electronically created virtualpresence transforms individual documents created in an assembly-linemode into ones that could have been produced by several people working atthe same time. In addition, by permitting individual documents to contributeto this electronically related overarching structure, hypertext also makes eachcontribution a matter of versioning. In so doing, it provides a model of scholarlywork in the humanities that better records what actually takes place insuch disciplines than does traditional book technology.