Caution, this is tangential and a little off task. I have six hours of excrutiating concentration coming up today, and this is a last little distraction.
Summary: an interesting and unusual hypertext web page from around 2001 on the topic of T S Elliots poem, "The Hollow Men" - is it a portfolio?
A long awaited book has emerged, the second volume of T S Elliots' letters and I was reading a review about it this morning at breakfast. The only thing I knew of this this poet was 'The Hollow Men' which I googled.
Near the top is this link: http://www.aduni.org/~heather/occs/honors/Poem.htm
This is a great little introduction to the Poem written in hypertext.
I found the overall guide to the work here: http://www.aduni.org/~heather/occs/honors/Default.htm
Written by Heather Van Aelst who is referenced on this page: http://www.aduni.org/people/index.php?view=students
A simple Google search discovers a little of the trajectory of the writer.
It looks like these pages were done as part of an innovative programme ADUni.org which I have a vague memory of reading about. It looks like a great experience.
The institution (If you can call it that) is ArsDigita http://www.aduni.org/
"ADU was a one-year, intensive post-baccalaureate program in Computer Science based on the undergraduate course of study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The majority of the instructors were professors from MIT and the program was tuition free. After running from September 2000 through July 2001, seeing the first class to graduation, the program was forced to shut down"
[I wonder what 'forced to shut down' means?] As a totally random comment, one of the workshops in the course was entitled "What to do when the Teacher is an Ignoramus or a Liar: Learning from Queries even when the Answers to the Queries are Wrong".My thoughts: is this little piece of hypertext a 'portfolio'? It probably is/was. It looks like it may have been part of the assessment. I find it fascinating that such a piece can be written (in 2001 I think) and live on in this way and that it was so very high up the Google search page.
Can work of this quality be produced more easily with really open class and portfolio opportunities? Maybe the answer is yes, and this could be what Michael is saying.