You can have an enhanced experience visiting the NY Times website using the Google Chrome browser.  If you go to http://www.nytimes.com/chrome, you will be presented with a very elegant layout of text and images on the screen.  Using a selection of layouts, a user can taylor how the news is presented. The thumbnails themselves serve as a representation (or preview) of what the actual layout will look like if it is chosen.  Below is an image of the "Gallery View" which only shows images from articles, but if you roll over the image you get the headline (and clicking brings up the full text).  I think that the designers of this site have put a lot of thought into how the information is organized visually and how the layout, graphics, and images represent the hierarchical and informational structure of the news.

The Drudge Report is one of the most poorly designed news sites I have ever encountered.  The page layout conveys no hierarchical structure, and images are used in seemingly random form. One of the worst things about the site is that an advertisement is placed at the top center of the page, and the actual site name is placed below an article heading.  While the images that are from news items do accurately represent an article link that may be located above or below the picture, the position of the photos on the page do not help readers make any sense of how information is presented on the page as a whole.

I think it would be interesting to take a chapter from a work of fiction and redesign it as hypertext. For example, take an early chapter from the first Harry Potter book (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone).  Following the seven books, it is fair to say that the fictional world created by the author has a clear and rich hierarchy of characters, settings, and plots. Traditionally, one might need to read all seven books to have a full understanding of the character Hagrid.  But structured as hypertext, one reading an early chapter might decide to investigate more about Hagrid and thus click on a link that leads to information about Hagrid's history (which does get revealed in chunks throughout the book series).

Within that sub-history, there might be links then contained to information about the various beasts which Hagrid enjoys taking care of.  This is more information that is revealed at various points in the series.  It is not information that is supplemental or provided after the fact.

I wonder, though, if the success of the fiction comes from the skill of the author to create a compelling linear text.  The conclusion may not have been as gripping if readers arrived at it having taken diverse paths.

Popurls.com is a news mega-aggregation site where the most shared items from popular news and social media sites are categorized and listed.

There is some nodal organization: information sources are the categories and the most frequently shared stories (videos, text, images) are the items contained within.  There is no script or order for which links I follow, though clicking on any one story usually leads to my finding a new cluster of stories to check out.  Though clicking on a link generally opens a new window that navigates out of popurl's domain, I often find myself going back to the popurls site when I am ready to start down a new path of link clicking and reading. That to me is an indicator of good hypermedia design.

I feel bad criticizing this teacher's attempt from 2004-2005 to create a webquest. Creating "webquests" for students became very popular as web-publishing became more accessible to teachers.  However, as you will see on the page that though the teacher provides links to other sites within the organization of the activity, students would have to progress through in a very linear way.  If the main goal is to buy a car, then a better way to have presented this information may have been to create categories and links and then let students attempt to come up with a proposal for how they would buy the car. While the scaffolding that was presented is helpful, I believe that similar support can be provided in a less linear way.

I could consider myself to be a digital native only because I grew up with computers and video games. However, I think an important distinction needs to be made between my digital native-ness, and young people today who have grown up only knowing a networked and connected world. I therefore suggest a third category of "Digital Naturalized Citizens" who are not necessarily natives yet have assimilated very well into the "Digital Native" culture. I feel that I most appropriately fit into this category.

I notice digital natives in the schools where I have worked, these students instinctively texting or IM-ing a friend before calling that friend on the phone.  I have also noticed countless digital natives, mostly in the form of instructors, who believe that learning takes place through delivery and acquisition of content knowledge, rather than through construction of understanding through meaningful and authentic tasks.

Prensky's contrast of "Legacy" against "Future" content is interesting, but I feel that identifying discrete disciplines perpetuates an old model of education where instructors tend to only have one area of domain expertise.