How you shape this information is the key to technical communication. The edge of knowledge for us in writing instruction is moving fast and we need new and better ways of at least staying within sight of it. Information in the WWW is distributed and organized in hypertext, a new medium of communication. As teachers, we need to train students not only the writing process, genres and conventions of technical writing. Promising though the WWW is, not all information on the WWW is relevant to our class, students and level.
Students always face the problem of loss of direction.
Unless they have a specific goal or task in mind, they may not know where to start, what to do besides browsing, and where to go next. They may lack the ability to censor what is useful for them. How to foster this critical literacy, to allow students flexibility and freedom in learning and yet without losing control is our central concern. We also need to equip technical students with efficient cognitive strategies to locate, identify and concentrate on what they want. Training them to think and write in hypertext is difficult but beneficial.