I want you to picture something with me. Go back
to, say, seventh grade. OK. You're sitting in
class and the teacher hands out the textbooks
for the year. Heavy, glossy, probably smells
like, you know, industrial glue. Oh, yeah. But
before you can even open it, there's a lecture,
a very specific warning. The condition lecture.
The condition lecture. This book is number 402.
It is in good condition. When you return it in
June, it better still be in good condition. And
the cardinal sin, the one thing that would get
you sent to the office faster than talking it
back. Writing in the margins. Highlighting, underlining,
even a stray pencil mark. It was treated like
a crime. Which, if you really think about it
from a learning perspective, is completely backward.
Oatley. I mean, engaging with the text usually
means marking it up, arguing with it, highlighting
the key points. But in schools, for like the
last century, that was vandalism. Vandalism.
That is the exact word used in the piece we're
covering today. And it really stuck with me.
Why was interacting with knowledge considered
destruction of property? That's the question
that's launching us into today's deep dive. I
love that question. We are looking at a fascinating
article by Gary Ackerman from Hack Science Education.
It was published back in December 2022. And the
title is, On Digital Information in Schools.
Which, I'll admit, sounds a little dry. It does,
but it's not really. He's not just talking about
iPads replacing paper. No, not at all. It's more
like a philosophy of knowledge, just kind of...
disguised as a tech article. Exactly. He's arguing
that we've undergone this fundamental shift in
the physics of information. Right. We moved from
an era of heavy lifting, where information was
actual physical matter, to an era of signals.
And that change explains everything about why
you weren't allowed to write in that textbook.
So let's unpack this era of heavy lifting, because
I think we forget, you know, now that we live
in the cloud, that information used to have actual
weight. It had mass. Ackerman calls them physical
artifacts. If you wanted to teach a kid about
the solar system in, say, 1990, you needed a
physical object, a book, a film strip, maybe
a model. And creating that object was this huge
industrial process. Oh, absolutely. You can't
just hit publish. You have to, I don't know,
chop down a tree, pulp it, bleach it, press it,
ink it, bind it. And then you have to move it.
This is the part Ackerman highlights that we
often just... We just overlook it. The dissemination
part. Yeah, the dissemination. Information had
to be shielded from the elements. It had to be
put on a truck. It literally burned diesel fuel
to get from the printing press to your locker.
Which brings us right back to the vandalism rule.
It wasn't just that the teachers were mean or
something. No, it was practical. It's that the
information was expensive. It was scarce. That
textbook had to last for five, maybe 10 years.
So if you highlighted a paragraph, you were degrading
a physical asset. that the school district couldn't
afford to just go out and replace. The user experience,
to use a modern term, was all about preservation.
You were a viewer of information. You were never
a participant. It was static. You look, you memorize,
you return the object. And if you damaged it,
you got a bill. Ackerman mentions that, specifically,
the financial penalty for altering the artifact.
It created this mindset, right, that information
is something to be protected, not something to
be messed with. But then the computer arrives.
And I feel like usually when we talk about computers
in schools, we talk about engagement or games.
Sure. But Ackerman goes a lot deeper. He looks
at the actual mechanism of how digital information
is made. He asks a question that seems really
simple, but it's actually quite profound. Which
is? How is digital info actually created? I mean,
I, I type on a keyboard. Right. But what is physically
happening? You perform a physical action, a keystroke,
a gesture, a spoken word, but almost instantly
that physical action gets converted into an electronic
signal. So you stop manipulating matter. And
you start manipulating energy. And once it's
a signal, the rules of physics, at least the
old physics of books, they just don't apply anymore.
OK, this is where he brings up RAM versus ROM.
Right. Yes. And this is where I think it gets
brilliant. I know everyone hearing this is thinking,
OK, I know what RAM is. It's the memory stick
in my laptop. Yeah, I feel like we've all had
to upgrade our RAM at some point. But he's not
talking about specs here. No, not at all. He's
talking about the nature of the information when
it lives in RAM, random access memory. OK. Think
of RAM not just as storage, but as a A workspace.
A workspace, right. When information is in RAM,
it's totally fluid. It is inherently unstable.
But in a good way. In the best possible way,
yeah. Think about that textbook page. The ink
is dried. It's rigid. You can't just move the
third paragraph to the top. But in RAM, the document
is liquid. You can delete a sentence, move a
chapter, change the font, resize an image. The
information has no final form as long as it's
in that state. So we go from the protected artifact
to the manipulable signal. Exactly. And Ackerman
identifies these three superpowers of this digital
state. The first is what we just discussed. Manipulability.
The ability to change the content without destroying
the medium. You can't vandalize a Word doc. You
just edit it. You just edit it. And that's a
huge psychological shift for a student. You're
not ruining it. You're iterating. Right. What's
the second one? Then you have replicability.
The perfect copy. This is something the physical
world just never had. If I photocopy a photocopy,
it gets blurry. Or record a cassette tape from
another tape, the audio degrades. There is always
loss, but digital signals. You can make a million
copies of a file, and the millionth copy is bit
for bit identical to the first. And you can do
it instantly. Which leads to the third power.
Transmission the end of the shipping truck pretty
much the latency of information used to be measured
in days or weeks now It's measured in milliseconds
You can send that perfect manipulable copy to
the other side of the planet before you can even
take your finger off the mouse So if we look
at the classroom, this just it blows the walls
right out the completely Ackerman does this comparison
in the article that I found really staggering.
He lists the inventory of a typical pre -digital
classroom It's a pretty sobering list when you
hear it all laid out. It really is. So let's
run through it. In the era of heavy lifting,
what did a student actually have access to? OK,
so first you have the textbook, one per student.
That is your Bible for the subject. If it's not
in the book, you probably aren't learning it.
And maybe that book is five years old, so Pluto
is still a planet, or the Soviet Union is still
a thing. Right. Then you have the classroom library.
Ackerman estimates. Maybe 50 volumes? 50. And
these are books the teacher probably bought with
their own money. 50 books. For 30 kids. Then
you have the school library. Okay, several thousand
books, which sounds like a lot. It's not really.
Oh, because that's covering every subject for
every grade level. And it's static. It's a snapshot
of what the librarian decided to buy in 1985,
1990, 1995. And for current events. Oh. News.
A few score periodicals. Maybe you have a subscription
to Time, Newsweek, National Geographic. So the
sum total of human knowledge available to a student
was whatever could fit in the building. It was
a walled garden, a very small, very curated garden.
If you had a question about something obscure,
say, deep sea vent bacteria, and the school library
didn't have one of the three books written on
that topic. You were just dead in the water.
You were. Your curiosity had a hard physical
limit. And now? Now the ceiling is gone. Ackerman
contrasts that list with the modern reality.
Students don't just have more books. No. They
have access to full -text databases indexing
thousands of periodicals. Not a few score. And
not just popular magazines. We're talking academic
journals. Yeah. Primary sources. Infinite online
video. And I love that he uses the word infinite.
It practically is. It really feels that way sometimes.
But here's the key shift. Access to credible
institutions directly. What do you mean by it
directly? Well, in the old model, if NASA discovered
something, they'd publish a report. Maybe a textbook
author would read that report, summarize it,
and put it in a book. Two years later, the school
buys the book. Exactly. Now, the student just
goes to NASA .gov. They watch the rover land
in real time. The middleman of the textbook publisher
is just bypassed. So we've gone from scarcity
protecting the one book we have to absolute abundance.
Backerman calls it vastly greater amounts of
information placed directly into the curriculum.
It's an explosion. And I feel like this is where
the article takes a turn. Explosions are messy.
They are. Very. If I just dump a billion pages
of text onto a student's desk, I haven't helped
them. I've buried them. Precisely. This is the
navigation problem. Ah. When information was
stairs, the problem was access. Now that information
is infinite, the problem is sorting. It's the
needle in the haystack, but the haystack is the
size of the universe. So how do we cope? The
source talks about the mechanics of search, which
I think we all just take for granted. You know,
you type in the box and magic happens. Right.
But what's actually going on under the hood?
Well, Ackerman breaks it down to a core mechanic
he calls rapid comparison. The computer is scanning
the contents of millions of files against your
search terms at lightning speed. So it's just
comparing text to text really fast? Basically,
yeah. It uses indexing to make that possible.
But the really interesting part, the part that
connects back to the human element, is tagging.
Tagging. You mean like hashtags? Yes. But think
about what tagging is. It's a human -computer
collaboration. We, the users, add tags to information.
We label it. We say, this isn't just a picture
of a dog. This is hashtag golden retriever, hashtag
cute, hashtag puppy. So by doing that, we're
teaching the machine how to organize the chaos.
We are. It's a participatory way of building
the card catalog. That's a cool way to frame
it. We aren't just searching the library. We're
helping to organize it every time we tag something.
But the tech is moving past just matching keywords.
Ackerman mentions that researchers are developing
tools to interpret ambiguous search terms. Ambiguous.
You mean like when I type funny movie old guys
because I can't remember the name of grumpy old
men exactly that when your query is vague or
messy or just human the goal of modern search
isn't just to match the keyword funny it's to
figure out what you mean it's trying to interpret
your intent that feels like the real frontier
That's the difference between a tool and, I don't
know, an assistant. It is. And Ackerman argues
that these tools, the indexing, the tagging,
the interpretation, they're not just nice to
haves. They're essential. They're essential.
Without them, the infinity of the internet is
basically useless. You can't navigate the ocean
without a compass. It really emphasizes that
the skill set has to change then. In the 1990s,
the skill was remembering facts because looking
them up was so hard. It was a whole process.
You had to go to the library. Right. Now looking
them up is instant. The skill shifts to filtering.
Can you construct a good search query? Can you
evaluate the results? Can you tell the difference
between the NASA report and some conspiracy blog?
The heavy lifting shifted from our backs to our
brains. That's a perfect way to put it. The friction
isn't physical anymore. It's cognitive. You know,
I want to circle back to where we started the
vandalism of the textbook. OK. Because when you
look at it through the lens of this article,
that rule against writing in the book wasn't
just about saving paper. It was about authority.
How do you mean? Well, the book was the authority.
It was finished. It was perfect. You, the student,
were just there to absorb it. You weren't worthy
of adding to it. That's a really strong point,
the read -only culture. But with digital? With
RAM, everything is a draft. Everything is remixable.
If I download a data set from the government,
I can put it in a spreadsheet, make my own charts,
come to my own conclusions. I'm not just reading
the history. I'm kind of touching it. You're
manipulating it. You've moved from being a passive
consumer to an active participant. And that's
the core of it. That is what Ackerman is getting
at. The digital shift isn't just about efficiency,
it's about agency. The student becomes a creator
of knowledge, not just a warehouse for it. But
that agency depends entirely on the tools we
just discussed. If you can't search, you have
no agency. Correct. If you can't navigate the
ambiguity, the machine decides for you. And that's
the scary part, isn't it? The ambiguous search
tools. A little bit, yeah. If the search engine
is guessing what I mean... Isn't it also kind
of shaping what I find? It is. It's a feedback
loop. The tool helps you find what you want,
but it also subtly directs you toward what it
thinks you want. Which brings us to the final
thought I wanted to leave with today. Ackerman
highlights that these tools are getting better
and better at interpreting us, at figuring out
our vague, messy questions. They are becoming
more intuitive. But I wonder, and this is just
me kind of riffing on the source material here.
Go for it. If the machine gets better at understanding
bad questions, do we lose the incentive to ask
good ones? That is the danger. If we rely on
the algorithm to fill in the blanks of our curiosity,
are we really investigating or are we just being
spoon -fed? It's the difference between learning
to fish and just asking the fish to jump into
the boat. And in a world of infinite information,
that distinction is everything. We went from
don't write in the book to rewrite the whole
world. But we need to make sure we're actually
the ones holding the pen. Couldn't have said
it better myself. Gary Ackerman's article is
on digital information in schools, and it is
definitely worth a read if you want to understand
the plumbing of the information age. Thanks for
taking this deep dive with us. Always a pleasure.
Keep asking better questions, everyone. We'll
see you next time.