Have we read yet?

It's an easy and common misconception that reading means visiting each and every node once and only once. Six or seven weeks into a course, students will realize they won't get to or have to read everything, and then they're okay. (This happened to me in college with my regular reading for my English major, but I'm not sure that the sort of physically overwhelming amount of reading is a common experience before grad school for everyone, so I'm not sure whether I can generalize that analogy.) Still, though ...

.... "Are we reading yet?" - how do students know they've done the assignment in a non-linear text that doesn't necessarily chart their completion like page-counts do? The structure in hypertexts are often too obscure. There isn't an easily accessible history. And students don't have any experience what it's supposed to be like. A counter-argument is: don't underrate existing "hypertext"... games, websites, etc. Students know when they've gotten through those.

Information retrieval as hypertext-- Is searching on google equivalent to reading Patchwork Girl? It's a different model of authorship, of literacy. Or is that difference simply a matter of mapping and of history? Wth CubicEye you clearly build a text out of a web search. The spatial model is hard to get for some people.