Schools—relation of hypertext with education.

The tour of schools in Cyberspace may sound highly irrelevant and boring to a traveller. However, as a peripatetic who should not cease learning, you would have known by now that the most ordinary aspects of life are shaped vastly in Cyberspace. The development of new technologies and their application in educational settings is bound to bring about a whole new set of possibilities and problems. Hypertext is finding its way into many different aspects of our lives from the classroom to home, to work. This new mode of presenting information promises to change the way we read as well as the way we pursue and understand knowledge, and because it is becoming increasingly used for educational purposes. The web, as we know, represents a nonlinear and nondirected presentation of information and thus often falls into the category of poststructuralism. In the fields of education, this new wave has been blurring the past rigid boundaries between authors and readers, by encouraging interpretations at all levels. This tends to lead students away from narrow and essentialist views of knowledge. George P. Landow, in his work titled Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology, writes:

Computer based learning is a said to provide individualised and self-paced instruction and allows sophisticated branching whilst controlling the sequence of topics made available to the user. Computer mediated communication claims to encourage discussion and reflection. Some of the advantages claimed flow directly from the use of the hypertext facility, for example within the WWW by providing the learning materials (in hypertext form).

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