The absence of an authoring agency in higher education is often reflected in the bewilderment of students who feel they have been forced to take courses which have no relevance to their life goals and interests. At the University of Washington School of Drama, a project was developed to involve undergraduates in the development of an open-ended hypermedia document by building a document out of students' research and scholarship. In "The Philadelphia Project," a hypermedia application was developed which would provide different learning environments for various learner types. The project focused on the city of Philadelphia and the Chestnut Street Theatre during the period between 1790 and 1835. In the first seminar, questions were explored on how people learn, and how computer assisted instruction (CAI) materials might be developed which could accommodate various learning strategies. A second seminar saw students working together to develop a storyboard of ideas, and then background research on the selected topic. In a period lasting over 18 months, preparations included costumes, rehearsals, and production of live action footage, the development of tutorials to accompany the clothing and costume pictorial data, and the production of a laser disk. The most important lesson to emerge from this experiment was that in hypermedia use, form follows problem solving and discoveries which result from students synthesizing information into knowledge and knowledge into understanding. (AEF)