Maybe it really doesn't make any difference. In today's world just about anything goes, and submitting a highly personal and reflective thesis on the use of hypertext in the framework of a column of essays may not raise any eyebrows. In other words, one logical answer to the question of why this thesis is being submitted in the School of Education is the rather simple answer of "why not?". Even so, at least a few winks in the direction of what all this may have to do with education seems called for.
Perhaps the first point to be made in this respect is that the basic idea of connecting between ideas via hypertext is an accepted and even expected one in today's schools. When pupils are called upon to prepare multi-media presentations those presentations are constructed as essentially a series of links. More often than not, these links are solely linear, leading to additional material that enlarges on the basic topic, and then back, but are still links. If pupils are going to learn to use tools such as multi-media we are going to have to teach them not only how to physically create the connections between documents, but how to conceptualize these, how to make them fit as an integral part of the whole, how to use this tool wisely. I don't claim that my use of the connectivity of hypertext has always been wise, but it is an experiment from which it is possible to learn.
And just what might it be possible to learn? A number of answers come to mind. Among these are:
Developing extended thoughtsHypertext will probably become another tool that, like so many others, will be extensively misused. Even so, there is much positive use that might be made of it.
When and what to quote
Writing as reflective thinking
Constructing group knowledge
Go to: Trying to make some
sense out of all this, or
Go to: An introduction to the extroduction,
or
Go to: Web Essays - The evolution of a (personal?)
medium