Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [49]
Nowadays, I can look up anything I want to learn about in an instant. I visit the Web to find those extra references. The Internet allows me to drill down deeper than ever into any given subject. I don’t visit our library at Microsoft, and I never ask them for books. I just count on them to subscribe to the online collections that give me access to the professional journals and conference proceedings for my field. They also give me online access to market research, press clippings, and so forth. University Web pages are bursting with all kinds of intellectual treasure. Gone are the days of writing to other libraries to get material not found in my local library. I now call up the thesis of an obscure graduate student from the other side of the world as easily as I acquire a paper by a colleague down the hall. Out-of-print and out-of-copyright books are available by the thousand on sites like Project Gutenberg and Google Book Search. More and more books come straight to my Kindle e-book reader.
With the Web, our ability to research has been greatly amplified. Total Recall will take research productivity another notch higher. Your e-memories will provide quick access to the things you’ve already seen and the details of what you already know. You can step back from the vast world of information on the Web and focus on what you have found interesting in the past. You can collect and organize your own unique library.
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