Hypertext as Learning Tool

I was particularly interested, this week, in a quotation within the Janangelo article by George Landow: "[hypertext serves] to liberate us from the confinements of inadequate systems of classification and to permit us to follow [the mind's] natural proclivities for 'selection by association, rather than by indexing'" (277). I think what Landow calls the "mind's natural proclivities for selection by association" must be taken into account when, we, as educators, attempt to introduce students to new material. The mind is not a strictly linear function, and I think that hypertexts open up an entire world of associative logic and exploration that can make the learning process much more engaging. Here, I am speaking from personal experience, because one of the crucial turning points in my education involved a hypertext. I was a senior in high school when I discovered the Beats (primarily Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs). They represented radical opposition to everything I was being taught, and, for that, I loved them immediately. It seemed like they had created an entire literary world, and that I had just discovered it for the first time. One day I stumbled upon this hypertext which still exists (though it has been stylized since 2000):

http://www.litkicks.com/BeatPages/page.jsp?what=BeatGen

The hypertext links together all the major authors in the Beat movement, along with the Dadas, Surrealists, and other artists/thinkers (even back to St. John of the Cross and Dante) who had inspired them. I was sucked in immediately. Not only was the content radically new, but the format was perfect. Hypertext is radically non-linear, just as these thinkers seemed to be in their approach to reality. I felt as if I were passing through a series of doors (via the links) into new territory. There was no teacher there to tell me what was "required reading" and no single, monological "text" to read from front to back. It was more like walking through a forest, or exploring a ruin. I felt like I was the only person there, and that all of this was new.

The result was that I started making connections. The fragmentary knowledge conveyed in my English classes paled in comparison. I saw how past artistic movements and paradigms influenced subsequent generations, and I started to see myself as a possible inheritor of a tradition -- rather than just a receptacle for random facts about literary history. I tracked down every book that I saw mentioned on the site, one at a time. The summer between high school and college was an intellectual awakening. By the time my undergraduate career started, I was confident and had a sense, admittedly partial, of literary history. The hypertext had opened up a world, and now I felt at home there.

I never would have had the same experience with simply linear texts and footnotes. The sense of exploration, digression and wandering was crucial to my learning. I don't know how I will incorporate hypertext into my course just yet, but I plan to try. Maybe it will strike sparks.