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By Root 1051 0

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.

Textbooks commonly contain exercises and problem sets, of course, and e-textbooks will too. But the difference is: E-textbooks will be able to record your answers to your e-memory and check if they are right. Adding the e-memory is crucial. Think of a ninth-grade math student. Her assignments should combine older material with the latest lesson, to ensure retention of earlier skills. But which older material? Conventional textbooks make a best guess. An e-textbook with an e-memory knows what older material needs more work. It knows how long since the student last did such a problem. It can drill enough to distinguish between sloppy mistakes and true struggles. Areas of difficulty can be given more emphasis. It may be noted that while completing a certain type of math problem correctly, the student takes a long time, and the student may be referred to techniques that may help, or quizzed on more foundational skills that are suspected to be lacking. Topics that were mastered can be set aside, and only brought back after enough time has elapsed for retention to be a concern. Each assignment is completely customized to the student based on her learning record.

Like the scientists sharing their findings, students can benefit from sharing also. We all recall poorly worded questions or description in textbooks from our schooldays, and needing to pool our knowledge with other students to decipher what was meant. Students will share notes and crib sheets. Group projects will be able to build up a collaborative collection of links and notes from individual e-memories that all can tap into to produce the final result.

Additionally, a student’s memex will easily integrate his task list, tracking what assignments are completed and which are due next. It can help manage the student’s study habits, for example, pointing out that Johnny spent two hours studying for a history exam worth just 5 percent of the final grade while only spending a half hour on the geography midterm, which is worth 20 percent of the final grade.

HIGHER LEARNING

It is illuminating to contrast the scientist’s memex envisioned by Vannevar Bush with what is realized by the World Wide Web. Bush expected that

Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. . . . There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.

Bush didn’t foresee the Internet, so he never would have anticipated hyperlinked encyclopedias, such as Wikipedia, Questia, or Encarta, that are used without copying their entire contents into one’s personal e-memory. Trailblazers do exist, but in the form of those who publish pages of useful links. I know trailblazing is important, because when my team at Microsoft Research was working on networking, our “trailblazer” page of links to relevant research received far more traffic than any of our other pages for a time.

On the whole,