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INTRODUCTION

As we enter this new millennium, a variety of Golden Calves have been touted as the answer to our educational woes. Yet amidst all the solutions http://www.ed.gov/ bandied about, one fundamental question often gets lost in the shuffle.

What does it mean to be an educated person in the 21st century?

While we could debate this ad nauseum, I think we might agree on a few essential skills that will be important to successfully negotiate the new millennium. These could include the ability to locate, evaluate, organize, synthesize, and communicate information. As educators, what we want to do is give students opportunities to access ideas, assess those ideas, to make meaning of the information that comes their way and to develop communication strategies for demonstrating their understanding.

So, how can the lil lowly link http://humanities.byu.edu/rhetoric/allitera.htm}try saying THAT five times fast -- enhance what goes on in classrooms? Though many technology evangelists expound upon how the Internet can address the skills mentioned above, how many look at the power of its very interface -hypertext - to promote, even transform, the way students perceive, organize, and express ideas.

Let's look at how the Web's oft-ignored hypertextual interface - links - can be used to facilitate learning, thinking, and communicating.

WHY HYPERTEXT?

Why hypertext? Well, think about it. What was it that first lured you onto that vast wild and woolly plain some poor souls persist in calling cyberspace http://whatis.techtarget.com/Whats_Definition_Page/fl,4152,211883,00.html ? Was a grainy black and white video a brief snippet of sound? Was it a gyrating GIF that intrigued you to go further? No, most likely it was the simple act of clicking on a word or a link that sent you rocketing across cyberspace that first grabbed you by the collar and made you sit up and take notice of this newfangled Internet thang.

Steven Johnson, Web guru and Editor-in-Chief of the Web's superb FEED magazine http: //www.feedmag.com, suggests that "what we glimpsed in that first encounter was something profound happening at the level of language." As the author of Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms The Way We Create and Communicate, Johnson explains that hypertext presents perhaps the first significant new form of punctuation to emerge in centuries. As a "new grammar of possibilities," hypertext allows a new generation a whole new way of telling stories. And the way we tell our stories, Johnson tells us, "defines the way we think, the way we play, learn, and understand our lives."

As education increasingly moves towards a process-oriented, rather than a consumption-oriented model, teachers may discover that hyperlinks are key tools for finding, evaluating, reflecting upon, and conveying information. Links are the cornerstone of the Web's interactive interface; they are the vehicles via which we navigate the telecommunicative frontier. But links, like navigating the Web itself, often get a bad rap. Though we may call it `surfing the Web,' clicking on links is nothing like riding the waves. In fact, it's not even analogous to that other kind of surfing, channel surfing. All of us have sat in front of the TV set, remote in hand, hoping to find something remotely interesting. But selecting links is not like passively switching from channel to channel. When you channel surf you are bored. However, when you click on a link, you do so because you are engaged. You're interested; you want to find out more. Though people tend to think of links as diversionary, dissociate devices, they are in fact tools for synthesizing. Links build bridges between multifarious elements, connecting ideas, providing context, and forging relationships between topics.

Any perceived fragmentation or chaos instigated by hypertextual links is only problematic when viewed from a print-centric vantagepoint. While the print medium holds up stability and order as ideals, in the electronic age masses of reticulated, even self-contradicting texts are connected via the unity that hyperlinks provide. In an age of information overload, linearity may no longer be viable, or even preferable. Philosophers from the Greeks to McLuhan have posited that the tools we use to represent information influence the thoughts we think. Besides, non-linear, or hypertextual thinking aligns with the human mind's natural inclination to associate.

If non-linear thinking helps us to better understand information and the way pieces of information connect to one another, than hypertext is surely useful in shaping ideas in new, more expansive ways. Socio-linguistics pioneer Benjamin Whorf held that our thoughts are controlled by the language in which we think them. Links can help students develop expressive tools to facilitate thinking processes, and help them think in new ways that will enable them to thrive in today's world of information overload. Hypertext formulates information that helps in the search for, and construction of, patterns, or context.

"CONTEXT IS KING"

In the 19th century they used to say, "Cotton is king." Nowadays, some educators and some Web enthusiasts liked to exclaim that "Content is King." But in the new millennium, it might serve us better to recognize that, in fact, context rules the day. Futurist David Thornburg explains it as moving toward "just in time" instead of "just in case" learning. Rather than using a "bulimic" curriculum where students "binge and purge" information, students explore inquirybased and project-based learning where topics and skills are contextualized and made meaningful. Context is the driving force behind this new model of rigorous and relevant curricula.

If non-linear or lateral thinking illuminates anything, it's that information cannot necessarily be organized as rigid identities, consistently belonging to fixed categories like immovable blocks on the Periodic Table. We are used to an encyclopedic model of information management, where the goal was to find a stable slot for each piece of information. But in more flexible, alternative models, a piece of information's value lies in its connection to other information.

As Steven Johnson sees it, hypertext can help students see the world not as librarians but as poets do, an interconnected world teeming with associations and continuities. The links that comprise the Web's interface can be used to help children build relationships between chunks of content, relationships that make the content especially, even uniquely, intelligible. While hypertextual links can obviously serve to elaborate upon or augment ideas with additional information on a topic, teachers might think to exploit their potential as devices for synthesizing disparate topics, and for creating a context (or even multiple contexts) for a given idea or piece of information.

SYNTACTICAL POSSIBILITIES

Educators have also largely ignored the link's role as an element of style. Though hypertext's advocates have primarily focused on its revolutionary promise in the realm of storytelling http://www.eastgate.com, the link has exciting syntactical potential as well. While pundits and hypertext novelists gather to extol the virtues of hypertext on the macro level of storytelling, some Web authors and readers enjoy the innovative promise on the micro level of syntax. Some sites http://www.suck.com are brilliant at using links to give sentences latent as well as manifest meanings. Rather than spelling out its allusions, cluttering content with footnotes, asides, or contradictions and counter-arguments, well-written sites like Suck.com use links to illuminate the original prose in interesting, often hilarious ways. More than just electronic parenthetical clauses, links can be used to condense prose and play with multiple meanings, subtexts, as well as provide additional depth and scope to content where needed.

STUDENTS USING HYPERTEXT TO COMMUNICATE, ORGANIZE IDEAS

Students writing reports and essays should be encouraged to think and write hypertextually, using links to demonstrate their understanding and creativity. Language Arts and English teachers might also want to look into software -- like Eastgate's StorySpace -- specifically designed to facilitate writing hypertext documents. This software also allows teachers and students - as well as other authors cum readers - to comment upon and add to one another's work. It fosters collaboration, abets critical thinking and reflection, and enables students to demonstrate and share their unique understanding of curriculum topics. ESL and language teachers might also use links to develop - and help students develop texts that illuminate and demonstrate words' definitions, pronunciations, alternative meaning(s), origins, synonyms, etc.

In our age of information overload, assessing information is just as vital, if not more so, than accessing it. Media literacy http://www.amedialitamerica.org/othersites.html is an increasingly important skill as students are inundated with news and information from a variety of sources, with a variety of agendas. Students should be encouraged to evaluate information for accuracy, relevance, and timeliness. They can use links to assess the sources) of a given piece of information, and should be encouraged to link information to source material in their own writing as well.

STRATEGIES FOR MAXIMIZING HYPERTEXT'S POTENTIAL

So, what can teachers do to maximize the educational potential of the link? They can:

* Create - or co-create with their students - interdisciplinary and inquiry-based curricula that encourage students to uncover, and to forge thematic relationships between curriculum topics.

* Instigate students to think in a non-linear way, and to create hypertext content that provides readers with access to multiple resources and contexts.

* Have students use hypertextual writing environments to collaborate on projects and writing assignments. Software like StorySpace http://www.eastgate.com/Storyspace.html makes it easy for students, teachers, and other readers and authors to give and receive comments and provide addenda to one another's work.

* Help students to create the kind of hypertextual content that invites and facilitates interaction, discussion, and further investigation.

* Encourage students to use hyperlinks to assess information's source, relevance, veracity, or point of view.

* Think about now hypertext and links might be used to enhance ESL and other language-acquisition curricula.

* Discuss with other teachers ways in which hyperlinks can be used to improve students' research, investigation, analytical, and communication skills.

CONCLUSION

All in all, educators should explore with their students' ways in which an interactive, hypertextual interface can foment engaging investigation, analyses, and communication. I think you'll find that hidden within the lowly link is a tool capable of reinventing the way we organize and communicate ideas. Hypertext might even have the potential to transform nothing less than the ways in which we teach, learn, and even think.