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By Root 1052 0

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