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Students in my class entered with the (valid) conception that the writing tasks involved the development of well-organized essays that constructed clear arguments through carefully ordered paragraphs. The introduction came first, followed by some conceptualization of the topic and appropriate evidence for claims. The essay would end with a conclusion. With my course linked to a composition course on research writing, students' paper assignments in the linked course demanded this kind of linearity. This fact likely reinforced my students' conception of the academic hypertext as a standard essay with links.

The first academic hypertexts my students submitted looked much more like print essays than the multilinear sort of academic hypertext that was our goal for the course. The navigation in these first hypertexts looked mostly like an outline for the paragraphs in the linear, print essays. Fully half of the hypertexts actually included "introduction" and "conclusion" navigation buttons. In at least one instance, the student created "page one", "page two", and "page three" buttons to go between the "introduction" and "conclusion" buttons.

My hope had been that students would learn from the hypertext evaluation assignment that asked them to critique a web-published academic hypertext using Bolter's (1991) and Landow's (1994) ideas about the ways hypertext changes writing. While my students were capable of critiquing selections from such online academic journals as Kairos, Culture Machine, Nmediac, and Post-modern Culture on their mostly linear presentations, their first hypertexts basically replicated the very examples they had criticized. For much of the semester, most of my students struggled to effectively challenge the organizational conventions of the print essay. Students' implicit (and persistent) sense of the importance of linearity in the academic essay made it very hard for them to apply hypertext theory to their academic hypertext compositions. While we might recognize the potential relationship between hypertext theory and actual academic hypertext, my students mostly experienced a gap between the theory we read and our classroom practice.

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