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Thursday, September 6, 2001
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Temple University Center for Research
in Human Development and Education |
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Hyperlinking Narrative:
An Idea Whose Time Has Come
by Nancy Sulla, Ed.D. — President, IDE Corp. — Innovative Designs for Education
No 102
Writing has traditionally been two-dimensional: across and down a page. The advent of the Internet and newer computer technology has opened the possibility of writing in three-dimensions: across, down, and out through links to further information. Many websites today are moving to a more three-dimensional (or hyperlinked) look. While teachers are encouraged to use the Internet with their students, they are frustrated by the amount of time it takes for their students to locate viable sites for their curricular inquiries. Students can easily get "lost in cyberspace," using an inordinate amount of valuable instructional time. The predominant teacher response to this situation is to restrict the students' searches to a predetermined list of sites, either through bookmarks or WebQuests. While these approaches provide solutions to the immediate problem, they may ignore the greater reality that as a major form of written communication in our society becomes three-dimensional, students will need to learn the skills of three-dimensional reading and writing in order to be fully information literate.
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Three-dimensional writing, or "hyperlinking narrative," may seem to be a relatively new phenomenon in written communication. "If the book is a highly refined example of a primitive technology, hypertext is a primitive example of a highly refined technology, a technology still at the icebox stage" (Douglas, 2000, p. 15). Still, its roots reach back to the 1930s when Vannevar Bush, the son of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's science adviser, recognized that the human mind does not think linearly, but rather through associations. "With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain" (Bush, 1945, pp. 101-102). Bush developed the concept of the "Memex," a machine that would organize information by association. It was not until the 1960s that Ted Nelson coined the term "hypertext." Michael Joyce is credited with writing the first hypertext novel, Afternoon, in 1990.
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Copyright 2001 © MARTEC
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