Hypertext: Annotated Choose Your Own Adventures?

I've been trying to think this week about what we know about how texts work well and engage audiences--and how we can apply those understandings to improve our creation of hypertexts and hypermedia. For me, and based on the readings over the past few weeks, good hypertext expands on what we know from our understandings of literacy, rather than abandoning them.

When I was younger, I loved reading Choose Your Own Adventure novels--having that much control over how the story enfolded was an amazing amount of control. Those two--or three--short sentences at the end of each page completely changed the way I engaged with the text. I'll be the first to admit--I almost always peeked ahead to see what was going to happen next with each of the choices before I decided on one--and even read one cover to cover once, rather than by jumping around--and was just continuously amazed at how much the act of flipping pages shaped my experience. When hypermedia is well constructed--especially if we think about novice or intermediate learners (in terms of content knowledge), the format of Choose Your Own Adventure books seems particularly helpful.

When I've created hypermedia before as a teacher, I've often focused on embedding multiple layers of meaning and scaffolding for students. I was amazed to find in this week's literature review that there really isn't any benefit--and in some cases it's even detrimental--to include semantic information like that. In many ways, it reminded me of the editions of Shakespeare I read in high school and college. In the high school texts, the right page was always the traditional Shakespearean text--word for word, line for line. The left hand page included footnotes, translations, and explanations to help clarify the language. In college, however, both pages were Shakespearean text, while the annotations and explanations were at the end of each volume as a series of footnotes. While I remember feeling at the time that the high school versions were a bit too juvenile--too much support and analysis--the formatting was so much more helpful than flipping back and forth to the footnotes--especially when it wasn't clear when there would be information there to find--or not. I wonder how, especially for more advanced/crucial topics, we can take this idea of paralleling annotation and narrative to make semantic information more helpful, rather than distracting.

While there are a lot of things that hypermedia and hypertext can learn from traditional text--formatting, consistency of font, ability to quickly find information--I keep coming back to this idea of conceptualizing good hypermedia as a well constructed, annotated, multimedia choose-your-own-adventure....without the death and injury ;)

What do you think?