Untitled - witz cultural

342HYPERTEXT 3.0 or elsewhere in Milton's writing-or,for that matter, interpretations and criticaljudgments made since the poem's first publication-and that he couldthen call up any or all of them.This scenario originally ended with my remark that hypertext allows studentsto do "all these thingsl' Now I would like to ask what such a scenarioimplies about the political relations that obtain between teachers and students,readers and authors. These issues, which writers on hypertext havelong discussed, also arose in questions I encountered when delivering invitedtalks on my experiences in teaching with hypertext. One of the administratorsat my own university, for example, asked a question I at first thoughtrather curious but have since encountered frequently enough to realize isquite typical for those first encountering the medium. After I had shownsome of the ways that hypertext enabled students to follow far more connectionsthan ever before possible between texts and context, she asked if I wasnot worried because it limited the students too much, because it restrictedthem only to what was available on the system. My first response then asnow was to remark that as long as I used print technology and the limitedresources of a very poor university library no administrator or member of thefaculty ever worried that I found myself unable to suggest more than a verylimited number of connections, say, five or six, in a normal class discussion;now that I can suggest six or ten times that number, thus permitting studentsa far richer, less controlled experience oftext, helpful educators suddenly beginto worry that I am "limiting" students by allowing them access to somepotentially totalitarian system.One part ofthe reason for this reaction to educational hypertext lies ina healthy skepticism. Another appears in the way we often judge new approachesto pedagogy as simultaneously ineffective, even educationally useless,and yet overpoweringly and dangerously influential. Nonetheless, theskeptical administrator raised important questions, for she is correct that theinformation available limits the freedom of students and general readersalike. At the early, still experimental stage in the development of hypertextwhen I was asked that question, one had to pay great attention to ensuring amultiplicity of viewpoints and kinds of information. For this reason I emphasizecreating multiple overviews and sets of links for various documentsets, and I also believe that one must produce educational materials collaborativelywhenever possible; as I have suggested, such collaboration is veryeasy to carry out between individual instructors in the same deparLment aswell as between those in different disciplines and different institutions. Now