Smith

Smith, Catherine. "Hypertextual Thinking." Literacy and Computers: The Complications of Teaching and Learning With Technology

Smith's article begins begins with a philosophical evaluation of hypertext as it exists today and moves on to propose a "different vision of hypertext". She summarizes some key concepts from the works of contemporary philosphers Susanne Langer and Walter Kintsch, detecting in both a shared notion of the human mind: "thought is a dynamic system of involvements" (275), and making this postulate into the starting point for her theorization of new models of hypertext, which she hopes to see profilerate in a near future. Smith envisions a "conceptually enriched" type of hypertext that allows for "thick cognition (276). [Clearly, some of the ideas she so convolutely argues for in this piece, published in 1994, are taken for granted today by even the most casual internet users: her hope that "a user could presented with theme links, not only structure or keyword links", and that "users could teach the system what they want to know", has been granted even by the dreaded Wikipedia]. As for the implementation of hypertext in pedagogy and didactics, Smith's main contention is that in order to produce a wave of hypertextually-thinking and hypertext-using scholars, capable of fruitfully stretching the intellectual horizons, a thorough heuristic will be needed. I do think that here she touches on an issue that is still very real today, as I find that my colleagues and my students (as well as myself...), part of a generation with unlimited access to the hypertextual universe of the WWW, are for the most part ignorant about how to make productive use of what the web has to offer. In my experience as a grad student, prof. say "never quote wikipedia!", "beware of google!", or "don't use online translators!", but it's a plain fact that everyone does make a massive use of internet resources (professors included), yet still very rarely (seminars like ours being the rare exception) are students provided with structured advice or a consistent set of guidelines on how to make good use of hypertextual and web resources.