"Ok, class take out your laptops and load Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden. Today we are going to look at characterisation and links between the characters. I want you all to pay special attention to the relationships and conflicts in the hypertext as I will be handing out your first essay question at the end of the class."

This is how I imagine the class of the future will be. English students will study digital narrative as they have done printed narratives; it is because of this image that I found it important to take this course and study digital narratives. You see my plan is to be an English teacher and because I will be teaching into the future I feel it is valuable to acquire an understanding of the types of narrative that I will have to teach; after all, one would find it difficult to explain something to others if they did not anything more about the subject than their students did.

The first time I heard about hypertexts was in my own English class when I was in year eleven; for our final exam, we had the option of writing on a novel, short story, drama or hypertext that we had studied. I remember asking myself what was a hypertext. I didn’t know and none of my friends knew so I asked the teacher, but she just said, "Don’t worry about that one; we studied a perfectly good novel, just write about that". So I did, however I could not help wondering just what these mysterious ‘hypertexts’ were? My year twelve teacher did not know what a hypertext was either and all my year thirteen teacher could tell us was that it had something to do with computers, he thought. After school, I did not think much more about hypertexts until I saw the description for this course in the course catalogue. Hypertexts! Here is the answer, I might actually be one of the first teachers to really enlighten students with the futuristic wonder that are hypertexts and other digital narratives; the prospect of this excited me.

After taking the course, I began to realise that there was more to English narratives than paper and ink, which is and will become an increasingly small part of the study of English. I believe that exploring other mediums of text is essential in order for one to gain a fuller understanding English and for one to call themselves an English major they should understand this; its like calling yourself an explorer and not even bothering to discover what lies beyond your hometown. We are always going into the future so why live in the past.