Home computer use can lead to constant self-tutoring. The tutor reflects about bookmarks.

In The Road Not Taken, Robert Frost arrives at a fork where he must pick one road to travel. Looking down each as far as he can, he chooses the second. He then confides to the reader,

Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

An internet researcher faces much the same situation: one site can lead to another, then more may link from it. You might even visit a page but not read much of it, only to save it as a bookmark “for another day” – knowing, just like Frost intimates, that you’ll unlikely return.

Today I began looking through the bookmarks that I’ve accumulated on the main computer. I rediscover so many links to great sites that I recall finding, but didn’t follow up. Time is limited, and the topic that was urgent that day soon gave way to another.

On the internet, we’ve all joined the company of Robert Frost in a way perhaps unimaginable when he wrote The Road Not Taken circa 1915. With so many pages acting as nodes to groups of others, the internet surfer faces choice after choice, leaving by far most pages – and the ones that would follow – unexplored.

Source:

Smith, Philip (editor). 100 Best-Loved Poems. New York: Dover Publications, Inc, 1995.

www.poets.org

Jack of Oracle Tutoring by Jack and Diane, Campbell River, BC.