Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [56]
I have created several e-tours of the Computer Museum’s artifacts that are my own interpretation of computing history. Others use the Computer Museum’s artifacts as background for their own interpreted e-tours. If you want to see a great demonstration of a web of trails today, try out the World Wide Telescope, where you can take tours of a starry sky, zooming and panning to different areas, reading and hearing commentary at each stop, and, once again, discovering trail intersections that may entice you into entertaining side paths.
LIFELONG LEARNING
Writing this book while using MyLifeBits gives a foretaste of the future of learning. Jim Gemmell recalls reading a paper from MIT comparing lectures with experience, and searches for “MIT lecture web.” Too many results come back, so he adds the word “students.” Still too many, but now he remembers it was nicely formatted, and narrows down to just PDFs—there it is. He retrieves the paper and rereads the abstract to get his facts straight. In just a couple of minutes the information is included, complete with a full citation and the detail that grades improve by 10.8 percent. His learning about education is leveraged to understand Total Recall.
I imagine a high school senior who has a final exam in biology coming up. To prepare, she looks back to her midterm exams and finds all the problems that she got wrong. She searches her e-memory based on the text in the questions and finds the associated sections in the textbook, as well as the lectures that covered the material. Most were just things she needed to memorize better, so she adds those textbook sections to her “review for final” collection. But there is one problem that she just doesn’t understand, so she listens to the critical part of the lecture again, several times in fact, and consults the section in the text as well as looking up material on the Internet. She cuts and pastes key facts to memorize out of her “review for final” collection to create a fill-in-the-blanks study sheet, which she uses to cram for the final.
A graduate student in history has a paper to write on the French Revolution. Her grandfather is a professor of history, and when he did his Ph.D., it was a lot of work to pull together even ten citations for a midterm paper. For the student, every paper and book she has ever read on the French Revolution is instantly available in her e-memory. Besides the main text and four papers she is using in class, she pulls up another twenty-three references that she has encountered over the years. She is able to refresh her memory on a few points and use several quotes from the old papers. What would have taken her grandfather a full day at the library takes her just an hour. Not only is her paper stronger, but her memory of the subject has been reinforced, and her big-picture understanding is broader.
But it is not just students who will supercharge their learning using Total Recall. It is a given today that we all need to be lifelong learners. In fact, many educators insist that just cramming a student’s head full of knowledge is not the point; that the goal should be to educate the students to be better learners, brainstormers, and better collaborators. I know that in my own field of computer science, unless one is constantly learning, one’s knowledge will quickly become obsolete. Learning may well be the key to the greatest economic rewards of this new technological era.
Imagine Dan, a blueberry