The structure of the final few weeks of the course activated that critical sense of direction in 4, although I only discovered this 'fortuitously' as I read and discussed the text with the students themselves.

First, the students had strongly motivating goals while reading this text. When energy flagged, or a student ran into a particularly cryptic thread of text blocks with no apparent options for escape, or simply found her/himself exhausted by the alien encounter, s/he knew that the final exam. questions would all concern Patchwork Girl and the reading of hypertext in some way. Somehow, they had to keep going until they could reach a coherent analysis of the text, or fail the exam.

Second, because we read the text collaboratively in class, as well as individually or in a smaller groups out of class, few roadblocks, however threatening, stayed impenetrable for long. Either I, or another student, or a group working together could problem-solve locally.

While a student working at home might have quit the computer in disgust or despair, intensive classroom collaboration kept momentum relatively uninterrupted, thus opening up those 'fortuitous opportunities' for creativity. Again, the words the students used indicated the power they were deriving from their reading: inspires, ability, imagination. They not only created as readers but imagined as writers.