Email: joe@athena.mit.edu joe@astro.as.utexas.edu
I suppose I should say a little about myself. Right now, I am an astronomy graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin, busily trying to figure out what (if anything) effects turbulence has on type II supernova.
I'm interested in Tk and World Wide Web as a tool for teaching science and math. Hypertext is useful in teaching science and math, because you can use links to show how ideas are related in a way that's just not possible with conventional texts. For example, one can write an astronomy textbook with links to the latest papers that are written on an particular subject (for example supernova). One can also arrange the book so that a section on celestial mechanics, for example, is linked to another textbook which explains the mathematics involved. With hypertext, the act of learning about science, no longer becomes a passive activity, but rather an active one which the student explores the links he or she is most interested and becomes involved in the dynamism of it all.
About 400 years ago, the invention of movable type triggered a social revolution. Before, literacy had been the property of a privileged elites. Afterwards, it became the property of the humble masses, and the world changed dramatically.
I believe that hypertext and networked computers will produce as much of a social revolution as the invention of movable type. With these tools, you can put an entire University complete with the Library of Congress into anybody's living room.
What will be the social consequences of this revolution? I don't know what they will be, but I am sure that they will profound, and I suspect that it will transform the world for the better.
My work on the WWW project is my small contribution to this revolution.