From the Publisher: The essays collected in this volume address the full range of pedagogical and programmatic issues specifically facing technical communication teachers and program directors in the computer age. The authors locate computers and computing activities within the richly textured cultural contexts of a technological society, focusing on the technical communication instructional issues that remain most important as old versions of hardware and software are endlessly replaced by new ones.

This paper examines the dominant metaphors that define and describe three basic components of hypertext (texts, nodes, and links), arguing that they contribute in central ways to the current treatment of this technology in technical communication. It includes a brief overview of the way metaphors filter computer-based tasks and functions, a discussion of hypertext metaphors of identity and the realms from which they are commonly appropriated, and some corollary implications for students and teachers of technical communication. In general, this paper contends that hypertext design choices are both productively and unproductively shaped by social as well as technological forces.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>