Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything (15 page)

As an individual matures and takes more responsibility for his or her learning, the benefits of Total Recall will multiply. Total Recall will change how we teach students. It will change how we do science, and how all forms of research and scholarship will be pursued. It will change how we learn, from the simple lessons we absorb in grade school to the wisdom we will distill in old age.

E-MEMORY IN EDUCATION

Education has been a topic of intense debate since Plato. Should it be broad and “liberal” or should it be focused on a technical skill to prepare you for a job? Should education make you a better citizen? Some institutions denounce memorizing and prefer problem-solving and team interaction. Some promote a classic education, learning Latin and reading an extensive list of old books. Some advertise their excellent lecturers, while others say lectures are passé and point to their hands-on labs. Small class size, notebook computers for all students, home school, exchange programs, internships, self-directed study . . . the list of approaches is endless. And while all kinds of techniques are being tried, all kinds of technology will be also applied. Textbooks will become e-textbooks, most lectures will become e-lectures, and many study groups will be online.

Nevertheless, disparate as the approaches may be, Total Recall will have a conspicuous impact on all of them because it provides an e-memory vessel to hold the knowledge content for lifetime reference, including all the standard documents of our educational systems such as articles, books, and class notes.

It will be a new world for the teacher, looking out at a classroom full of lifelogging students. Expectations will change for students who have e-memories of classes. The e-memories of the teachers themselves will also impact the way we educate.

Think of the impact on lectures alone. There will no longer be a question of whether a lecture was remembered; the e-memory of it will be available at any time. The student will be able to replay a particularly tricky explanation several times, and to pause at each step to struggle with comprehension; it means the lecture can happen at the student’s pace.

In fact, e-lectures are so compelling that students may well prefer them to live lectures. First, they support self-pacing. Additionally, a good lecturer is usually chosen for an e-lecture—you wouldn’t bother making it with a bad one—while the quality of instruction out in the world is hit-and-miss. Jim Gemmell has home-schooled his children on occasion, and purchased a set of recorded math lectures that showed an animated chalkboard as you heard the instructor’s voice. His children quickly took advantage of the self-pacing. When they later entered public school, they complained about the quality of the teachers, often claiming that they survived entirely on the strength of the previous year’s e-lectures.

So, while students may start out recording their teachers’ lectures, I suspect that the trend will be more and more toward viewing lectures of the truly great speakers rather than of whoever happens to be assigned to the subject in your local school. Furthermore, I expect the role of the lecture to gradually diminish. An MIT study compared students who prepared using Web-based materials and then heard a lecture with those who prepared using the same Web materials and who then applied a small portion of the material in small projects together with the faculty. The replacement of lectures with hands-on experience led to a 10.8 percent grade improvement.

Of course, whatever live interaction replaces lectures will also be recorded. Students in, say, a physics lab will record video of their pendulum experiment, take a picture of a diagram drawn by the teaching assistant, add some typed and spoken notes, and record the class discussion. The notes they take will also serve as time markers, allowing them to quickly jump to a desired point in the recording. For example, a student will select her note that says “Weight #2” to begin reviewing the part where she changed the weight on the pendulum.

Imagine you have just returned from a seventh-grade field trip. You had to take pictures of six different kinds of leaves/needles from trees and identify them. The teacher was giving out hints and information as the class walked through the forest. You recorded what you thought you were seeing as you took the pictures. This leaf is prickly. That one is smooth. This one smells like turpentine. You compared notes with your friends and figured out that a couple were wrong, so you added new audio recordings to the pictures, correctly identifying the trees. Back in class the teacher shows pictures the students have taken and the class has to guess the species. Audio is played back to indicate the correct answer. This memorable field trip sticks with you. Years later, when you are forty years old and find yourself telling your daughter about the scaly quality of a cedar, the sounds and sights from that old field trip are what come into your mind—and you bring them up to show your daughter.

I have often been struck by the amount of time students spend comparing notes—not about the class material, but about exactly what the assignments are. I know of one class where assignments were sometimes posted on a class Web site, other times were handed out on paper, and on occasion were even modified verbally. I would call this poor communication and management, but the teacher actually believed it was important for students to struggle through this inconsistency. I don’t suppose we will ever be entirely freed of such teachers (or their counterparts in businesses, religious communities, sports teams, and so on). So e-memories will be a big help in tracking what the plan is. Students will be replaying the end of the class to get the new due date for their term paper.

Today, a student may already be creating an education portfolio, that is, a collection of her work chosen to represent her interests and accomplishments. A portfolio may include essays, reports, presentations, videos, or any other sample of the student’s work. Hailed for aiding student self-awareness and motivation, in addition to tracking student development, portfolios have been receiving a lot of attention from educators, and e-portfolio offerings have multiplied.

Total Recall will uncover the nuances of each individual’s learning style. Some students are visual learners; they don’t really get it until they see a drawing. Others are auditory learners who need to hear things. When you record your every move, you can look at what you are doing to better understand what is effective and what is not. Does cramming all night improve your grade, or would you be better off with a good night’s sleep? How much exercise, rest, and background music are best for you? What habits make you a more successful learner?

A complete e-memory will allow a much more detailed analysis of a student. Every single answer in assignments and tests can be considered looking for strengths, weaknesses, and trends. The exact time editing an essay down to the history of changes made to each individual sentence can be known.

Teachers will be able to know each student’s learning style, and to quickly look up the details of areas that need help. The kind of in-depth insight into a student that might have taken significant one-on-one time to discover will be made automatic, allowing the teacher to go straight to remedial tutoring or to the introduction of an advanced topic. If e-lectures are embraced, and e-memories automatically evaluate the status of students, we could see a radical change in how teachers apportion their time. Instead of spending it dealing with the entire class, teaching to a common denominator and unable to address the needs of both the brightest and the slowest, teachers will be able to concentrate most of their time one-on-one or in dealing with small groups of students who are roughly at the same level. The instruction will be much more targeted to individual needs.

By pooling data about students’ learning styles, study habits, and the results they obtain, we can advance our knowledge about learning itself. Anonymous learning data can be shared to give us a detailed picture over thousands, even millions, of students. The number of students studied and the level of detail examined will be unprecedented. A poor chapter in a standard textbook won’t last long, nor will a teaching method that falls down in a certain subject or with a certain kind of student.

Teachers will acquire as much self-knowledge about their teaching as students will about their learning. It will be easier for teachers to repeat their successful moments and to compare notes with one another about the most effective techniques. Suppose you are teaching grade-six science, and you notice that your students did poorly on a certain topic in Chapter 3. You can ask to view a colleague explaining the concepts to her students to see if there is a better way. Or, you may review the relevant assignments and find she has used some supplementary material rather than the textbook. You may recall that a certain unit of history went really well last year, and look back in your e-memories to refresh your memory of just how you taught it.

E-TEXTBOOKS + E-MEMORY = STUDENT MEMEX

Even more certain than the move to e-lectures is the transition to e-textbooks. I remember my Microsoft colleague Chuck Thacker holding up his tablet PC in one of our conference rooms a few years ago.

“Now, if I drop it like this . . .” said Chuck—and then let the tablet crash to the floor.

“You can see I’ve dropped it on that edge a number of times and the case is cracking.”

Chuck was clearly enjoying his job that day. How often do you get paid to drop your PC? As he explained to the group around the conference table, the PC was still running just fine, but he wasn’t pleased that the case was cracking. He started explaining the difference in g-forces involved in a landing on carpet versus concrete, and how a little bit of shock absorption protected the normally delicate hard drive. Chuck is interested in dropping tablet PCs because he wants them in the hands of children, and of course, everyone’s second question (after the price) will be: What about when they drop them?

Textbooks should be replaced by tablets, notebooks, PDAs, or even cell phones. Rather than lugging a backpack full of textbooks—sometimes so heavy that children have had their backs damaged, leading to some regulations to limit the load—a single notebook computer could hold numerous texts. An e-textbook can be superior in a number of ways. When a student wants to look up a certain passage from his history textbook, he can search for some keywords, rather than flipping through pages. What’s the definition of an acute angle? He can find it in a moment. It can include videos of historical events and animations of scientific processes. When he is learning a language, the e-textbook can allow the student to hear the words spoken, in addition to his reading them. Likewise, the computer can listen to the student speaking and comment on his pronunciation. An e-textbook will come preloaded with links. For example, whenever the student is working on a math problem, there will always be a link back to the section explaining the technique. If that section relies on previous material, there will be a further link back to it. E-textbooks will help visual learners develop crib sheets, while auditory learners can create voice prompts for their studying.

While e-books in general have struggled to assure authors that their copyrights will not be violated by pirating, there is no fear that schools will pirate textbooks. We can expect improvement in screens to make reading a better experience, and improved cases that can withstand more abuse, but present technology is already workable.

The switch to e-textbooks is important to Total Recall for two key reasons. First, it means the student will have a recording device with her. E-textbook devices should be capable of note taking, highlighting, picture taking, and audio/video recording. Many, like the tablet, will support handwriting, sketching, and diagram drawing. They will be able to record the student doing her assignments and will capture all the details of how she works. They will know exactly what parts of the text the student has looked at and for how long. Second, the same device that holds the e-textbooks will allow the student to consult her educational e-memories; they will replay class discussions, retrieve notes, or jump to the last point she was reading at.

The ability to consult your learning e-memories is critically different from being able to access textbook or reference material electronically. The vastness of our electronic resources is a wonderful thing, but it is a barrier to refinding, that is, finding something you found before. You may have performed a number of searches and followed several hyperlinks to get to a Web page the first time. An attempt to find the same reference again can be difficult: If you start with slightly different keywords, if you misremember what the top of the page looked like, if you encounter something that looks similar; any of these can prevent you from refinding the page. In contrast, the pages you have looked at form a much smaller pool to search in. The list of pages that you spent more than ten seconds looking at is even shorter (I have found that to be a very useful filter in MyLifeBits searches—it effectively culls all of the “no, that’s not what I’m after” pages). Likewise, a memory of e-textbook use pays off. Few courses cover an entire textbook; sections and even entire chapters are commonly left out of a course. Searching only what you have read before or quickly calling up just highlighted passages makes you much more efficient.

The tablet PC in the hands of the student of the future will be more than just a container of e-textbooks; really, it will be Vannevar Bush’s memex. Bush intended memex for scientists, but students need memex just as much. They are collecting material, making notes, needing to look things up quickly, and wanting links to the context quotes are taken from. A student memex is a combination of e-textbooks and e-memory.

A student’s memex will be accessible from his tablet PC and their cell phone; it will be with him in class, and everywhere he goes. Classes, lectures, and labs are recorded. When he studies with his friends and is grappling with just how to factor a certain kind of equation, he can bring up the recorded class lecture on his tablet PC and watch the teacher explain at the board again. He is able to quickly review Algebra I in the summer before proceeding to Algebra II in the fall. He can copy and paste from his text and lecture notes to make a crib sheet to study from. He can add his own links, within the text or to other texts. His notes will contain links back into the text. He can highlight and scribble notes over his e-textbooks—and then will be able to quickly find pages based on the amount that has been written over them. Imagine a view of thumbnail pages, only showing those with markup, with the text slightly faded to make the markup more visible. Now the student can quickly scan the pages for familiar markings, which are often more memorable than the actual context of the text—unique doodles and color patterns are encouraged as memory aids. He can also sort the pages being studied by the time spent on each, allowing him to refind a key passage as well as indentifying sections that have been neglected.