Archives: Expert Predictions

Another potential social problem is the long-term effects of nonsequentiality. Large parts of our culture have the built-in assumption that people read things in a linear order and that it makes sense to ask people to read “from page 100 to 150.” For example, that is how one gives reading assignments to students. With a hypertext-based syllabus students may show up at exam time and complain about one of the questions because they never found any information about it in the assigned reading.

Already we are seeing small shared-information spaces in teaching applications, but they are restricted to the students taking a single class. In the future we might expect students at large numbers of universities to be connected together. Another example of a shared information space is a project to connect case workers at branch offices of a certain large organization with specialists at the main office.