On Cornell & Hypertext

I thoroughly enjoyed this stimulating article on Cornell. I especially liked the way the author used the art of Cornell to both explicate his concerns concerning hypertext and to recommend a method that might be applied to helping our students use hypertext to write persuasive arguments. I thought that the argument he made for this, framing his discussion around Mead’s notions of prefigurative culture, helped me understand just where I might fit as an instructor in this fast moving world of technology and education.

Before reading this article, I would never have imagine that a student might deliver a hypertext paper to me and call it a persuasive essay. But upon brief reflection, it makes all the sense in the world that it could happen, and probably will. And why shouldn’t it? Aren’t we already experiencing this all around us in some forms? I am thinking here of blogs, wikipedia, and so forth. Of course, students are already composing in this way whether we recognize it or not. Given this, I find Janangelo’s notion that we should consider the subject and prepare to address it the classroom very apposite.

As an instructor, I feel hesitant to leap forward and try something as daring as this, and yet I feel the attraction of what might be gained in so doing. I liked what L. M. Dryden had to say about the use of hypertext in the composition of persuasive arguments: “to put technology at the service of students, to encourage their most creative efforts in exploring the connections between literature, history, the arts, and sciences, and most important their own lives.”