The first hypertext project I did with my middle school students
four years ago did not involve a computer at all. We simply didn't
have the technology in the building at the time. But I was impatient.
So, I decided to go with the concept, even though the technology
was not there. Instead of computers we used paper, pencils, staples,
markers, and string.
After a little negotiation about plot and various details,
my students agreed to write a story about a plane crash. Each
student would write from the perspective of a passenger. Students
spent two days writing about their "experience," sharing
their emerging "crises" with other students in the
class. Once the individual accounts were finished, they posted
their papers on a large bulletin board in the hallway. From there
they highlighted key words and phrases and sought relationships
between those and pieces of information they found in the pieces
written by their classmates. They then "linked" these
with pieces of string stretched between the key words and phrases
and the lexia they believed related to those words and phrases
in some way.
The finished product wasn't pretty, but it was effective.
Some students immediately saw a relationship between the "hypertext"
they had just completed and such tree fiction formats as Choose
You Own Adventures.
I no longer use the paper and string proto-hypertext approach,
although I'm thinking of going back to it as an initial excercise
next year. For me, it is the concept of hypertext that is most
important, the act of relating one piece of text to another.
