I'm also quite centered on text as the preeminent medium for study and learning, and thus on reading and writing. I don't think students do enough of either, though (truth to tell) I'm a bit afraid to examine how much I did at the same age. In fact, most students seem to carry on very active e-mail lives, reading and writing as a regular part of their daily activities. They clearly have familiarity with a lot of basic computer skills, though few seem inclined to experiment much these days with web pages (after a flurry of interest a year or so ago).
I'm afraid that I overlook instructional technologies that involve something other than hypertext, and that my idea of hypertext is pretty limited too (in practise I haven't gone much beyond linked references, digressions and amplifications). I imagine the possibilities unleashed by Java and perl, but I have only experimented a little bit with these tools. I have long been a consumer of work in "scientific visualization", but have not worked extensively with the tools that are evolving so rapidly and changing how data are handled. So I must ask: under what conditions would I do this exploration and learning? And it's a fair question, one that we need to pose on behalf of the faculty we hope to tempt into hands-on work with "instructional technology".
For me the answer to the "under what conditions...?" question is: if I could see some way that experimentation could augment how I do my job --make it better and more interesting, not necessarily easier. That's what attracted me to the web, certainly. But I need some pretty clear application to impel me into the struggle to learn a new product or technique or tool. Sometimes it's been enough for somebody to come along with a question or a challenge (that's how reference librarians work --"interrupt driven"), but because-it's-there is insufficent motivation.
(more to say about this too...)