This report describes hypermedia as a non-linear interlinked representation of textual, graphic, visual and audio material, that enables students to connect large bodies of information while developing analytical skills necessary to think critically about this information. It is noted that the use of microcomputers for hypermedia instruction represents an instructionally innovative way for students to manage information. The paper focuses on the use of a semiotic checklist to evaluate instructional hypermedia using HyperCard. Five semiotic criteria are presented and discussed: (1) intertexuality/intermediality, which emphasizes the linking of text directly with the author, its reactors, and its audience; (2) decentering and recentering, which involves the user making his/her own interests the center of learning rather than the author's vision of the computer software; (3) mediating networking and navigating, in which learners control their own paths through the situated relations; (4) negotiating expert and novice boundaries, which emphasizes the necessity for instructional designers to account for the differences in expert and novice knowledge representations; and (5) boundaries of individual work, in which the boundaries of text are weakened by nonsequential reading and thinking. It is concluded that the increasing ease of access for users and the ease of development for non-programming as well as programming instructional designers requires systematic evidence on hypermedia's instructional dimensions. A criteria checklist is included. (47 references) (DB)