 And the title of will's thesis is the network and the classroom, a history of hyper media learning environments. And I'm going to hand it over to Eric to introduce. Thanks Eric. Before before I introduce will I just want to say how how excellent all the work has been but also to note how diverse it's been. And yet, the whole student of whole student community has been clearly supportive of each other and I just want to give a call out to the whole student community for their work through challenging times here. So thank you to all of you for that. And so now I'll introduce will. And so I first met will a couple of years ago at PAX East. He had applied to the program I think he had gotten into the program and I met him at PAX East to see some of his work that he was working on in games, and was thrilled that when he was announced he was coming to the program. Because he had done such great work there came here started working I'm actually I'm wearing a playful journey lab official garment here, where he's been working at MIT. He's been doing work on games and continued to work on some of the work on games and assessment there but found his thesis passion and interest around hyper media. And, and I've been, I've learned a lot through his journey through hyper media and looking at his relationship to education and learning. And noted that he takes, I don't want to give too much away but he's given sort of a historical perspective on hyper media, and that history sort of coincides with my lifetime so I've kind of lived along a lot of the thesis work that he'll be talking about today so with that I will let will take it away. Thank you so much Eric. Let me just share my screen here. Okay, you may be blessed today a little bit with some New York City traffic noises throughout my presentation. Okay, so I'm going to begin. Can everybody see this is this visible. Okay, great. So I'm going to begin with some of the personal kind of origins of this topic for me. I was one of those students growing up who immediately upon graduating high school felt like I had kind of already forgotten a significant portion of what I had learned throughout my years of education. And as I began college for the first time I had the opportunity to choose classes, not only that I was excited about, but that overlapped with each other in different ways that felt meaningful to try to document, build upon and return to. Throughout this time I felt that kind of like lingering anxiety that I would come away from these years of school, feeling like I had when I finished high school that I had had all these deeply meaningful discussions and lectures and readings which would soon kind of drift out of memory. So what I realized I was looking for was a system for organizing my own knowledge that could act like a thinking partner, not just an ever growing pile of notebooks and readings but a system for organizing ideas that could let thoughts intermingle that could accompany my learning, and that would be valuable and generative to return to and explore, and ideally a tool that I could use in collaboration with others to share ideas as we learned. In the past five years there have been actually an explosion in popularity of these types of tools for creating network systems for organizing and sharing knowledge. And while this type of tool isn't always described using one single term. I refer to this genre of tool as hyper media knowledge organization tools and I'll take a moment to kind of break that down. So at its most simple hyper media, the term hyper media comes from hyper text, which refers to text which is not constrained to be linear and where the text itself contains linkages to other text or other documents which a user can kind of follow based on their own interest. And then from there comes hyper media more broadly, which refers to systems where other media forms like images and video can be connected in similar ways. The most obvious example of hyper text and hyper media is the internet itself where you follow hyper links to navigate networks of pages and content. And then when I say knowledge organization tools. I'm referring quite broadly to tools and practices which help arrange and document ideas and concepts. So taken together hyper media knowledge organization tools refers to tools which allow users to document organize and develop ideas which employ these practices of linking and network forming to to form these like networks of interconnected thoughts. Many of these recent tools promise to positively affect how people think, learn and generate ideas. These new tools make claims for helping people create a second brain in this example here by creating and following connections between notes and ideas. They emphasize non linear note taking and knowledge organizing and typically employ imagery as well as user interfaces that incorporate these interconnected nodes of ideas, which you can see here this is a tool called Rome research. Furthermore they emphasize collaboration and connection making across contexts is another tool called arena where you can locate single ideas and multiple folders at once. And finally, many of these tools propose that thinking and learning happen in these shared organizing spaces. So, while these recent tools make pretty lofty claims about their new features to help create context for improved thinking and learning. They build upon both technology and pedagogy that has been developing since the early days of personal computers. So in this thesis I asked, how can classrooms use emerging systems for collaboratively sharing and organizing knowledge in order to benefit learners, and how can we learn from the past in order to better shape the future of this work. I argue that examining the history of hyper media oriented learning tools by looking at both successful and failed experiments and bring them to classrooms. One can more deeply understand both the conceptual origins of these recent network knowledge tools and consider where they may be able to fit into today's classrooms, as well as how to avoid challenges that have plagued them in the past. So, indeed there's a whole lineage of these types of interactive and collaborative tools for organizing knowledge as networks that have been experimented with in classrooms since the 1980s. In this thesis I look at two previous moments of intense development in this space, one in the mid 1980s and another in the mid 2000s before then turning to examine these tools in the present moment. At each of these points I look at technological shifts, as well as trends in the learning sciences which together inform both the design and application of these tools. In doing so, I examine and draw lessons from the frictions involved in using these tools in educational contexts, in order to consider and propose ways in which these new tools might be able to be used to support learning in classrooms today. As I do so, I look at emulations and technical documentation of older software. I look at advertisements, promotional material and video content of people using these tools. Then I survey a pretty wide variety of research studies describing the application of hypermedia learning tools in learning contexts from each of these points. So in this presentation today I'm going to do kind of two things. First is give sort of quick historical overview of the development of these tools and the connections between hypermedia and learning as they've developed and discuss some of the frictions between educational media hypermedia and classrooms along the way. And then I'll shift gears and describe the current generation of these tools and point to three approaches that these types of tools could be used in classrooms. One of which I implemented in a middle school classroom context in the fall. But before getting there, I want to touch on why why this area is important. Firstly, building new capacities to document organize and structure knowledge is a crucial 21st century skill, the one that becomes ever more relevant when encountering increasing information saturation that we all deal with today. Making changes to education broadly is an incredibly challenging task. And particularly in the context of educational technology, new tools with great promise come in and out of popularity quite regularly and very rarely make any significant changes in popular educational discourse. In his book, Failure to Disrupt Why Technology Alone Can't Transform Education, Justin Reich talks in depth about why so many of the technologies which have been promised will radically transform educational practices have failed. It's worth a juxtaposition between two stances, the charismatic stance in the tinkering stance. The charismatic stance typically accompanies technological innovation. It's the notion that technology itself inherently will offer wholesale transformation of existing systems and it's this stance that often fails. In comparison, the tinkering stance he says sees schools and universities as complex systems which can be improved, but they believe that major improvement is the product of many years of incremental changes to existing institutions rather than the result of one stroke of wholesale renewal. So with this thesis I hope to take a tinkerer stance on considering the possible value of these types of tools. I see this in trying to pull lessons from the earlier eras of hypermedia learning that I examine and consider how these, how these tools might be able to offer some incremental changes to classrooms. So first I'm going to talk a little bit about some of the origins of the connection between hypermedia and and learning. Any account of the history of hypertext and hypermedia tends to begin with Vannevar Bush. He was an American engineer and inventor and led the US Office of Scientific Research and Development throughout World War II. Following the war, Bush sought to imagine schools as sorry, imagine tools, which might be able to enable the human mind to more readily think and learn across disciplines. In part this stemmed from a fear that the increasing hyper specialization which he saw amongst his research organizations would lead to a mountain of inaccessible knowledge. It is 1945 piece in the Atlantic titled as we may think Bush proposed a device called the memex to deal with this challenge. The memex was a device which would hold microfilm copies of the user's personal library and allow them to make automatic connections between text, such that they could create chains of intertextual association. Users of the memex device would save and share these paths of ideas between texts as well as their notes about them. As is apparent in the title of this piece, Bush wanted to develop a device that he operates as he believed, we may think. This notion that the mind naturally operates by association carries throughout this entire text as he says, with one item in its grasp, the brain instantly snaps to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. So embedded in his writing are few notions about learning that carry across many of the hyper media tools for organizing knowledge that developed in the following years. First is the idea that the mind naturally thinks and learns by making these associations. The second is that associations between ideas can link together from one to the next to form trails of connection as Bush describes developing tools by which one can create and save these trails will allow for deeper learning. And then third is that these trails are meaningful chunks of knowledge which can be built collaboratively where sharing and co creating networks of association between ideas will inherently lead to deeper learning. And then in the 20 in the 20 years that followed the terms hypertext and hyper media themselves were later coined by Ted Nelson in the 1960s who imagined digital systems which would use these models. He created diagrams to illustrate the idea of hypertext and hyper media one of which you can see here. And this this imagery is often repeated throughout the types of tools that we look at today. So, Okay, yes. Though this optimism in the power of hyper media to accelerate learning remained semi dormant for a few decades in terms of tools that were actually developed by the mid 1980s, multiple hyper media platforms simultaneously sprung forth that were specifically designed for the educational context. Researchers from across educational and commercial institutions promise that hyper media oriented learning tools would offer learners newer and faster ways of accessing knowledge, new modes of collaboration, and new types of interaction to enable learners to forge connections between ideas. By the mid 20th century, new theories of knowledge acquisition began to describe learning and thinking as processes using computational and diagrammatic metaphors which sounded much like Ted Nelson and Van of our bushes early descriptions of hypertext systems. These perspectives on learning were foundational and bridging the language of hypertext to the language of learning, which deeply informed the educational hyper media tools to come. So I'm going to talk about two of them briefly. The model of learning that stands out for its overlap with hypertext vocabulary is the model of schemas, a concept from psychology and cognitive science which describes patterns of thought or behavior which organize information and the relationships between them. The model of schema considers mental constructs as individual nodes which together form networks of ideas through associative structures which consist of attributes and relationships between them. Schemas focus attention on the role that old knowledge plays in acquiring new knowledge in the sense that new knowledge is filtered and interpreted through these webs of preexisting associations. Another important model to understand learning that was growing in popularity at this time was the idea of social constructivism. In the educational context, social constructivism emphasizes the deeply collaborative nature of learning, suggesting that knowledge develops through how people interact with each other, their culture and society at large. In classroom learning students rely on others to help create their own building blocks, with which they incorporate new ideas and interpret their existing assumptions about reality. So thinking about the computer as an educational tool in the context of schemas and social constructivism, it became clear that computers could be used as tools to think with. Hypertext based tools could readily act as a digital environment through which learners could model and extend the social construction of knowledge. By creating open and unstructured databases that allow for collaboration, learners can add and connect ideas and support and challenge each other's perspectives. Sometimes all this was happening, new developments in computing were simultaneously essential in creating the conditions for these these new educational hypertext experiences to develop. So, just to give a kind of overview of the like early 80s moment in 1981 IBM was releasing its first personal computer, which was the first to gain massive industry adoption. The first telecom offered the mental terminals which became the largest online service before the worldwide web in 82 land operating systems emerged which allowed network links between computers and offices in 83 Microsoft introduced for 84 CD Rom explode and popularity. In 1985 essentially computers, commercial computers have become powerful enough to store and manipulate multiple and just as networking practices were becoming increasingly possible, the business sector, both of which are crucial in developing the types of interactive platforms that come. So, I'm going to talk about one of the hyper media knowledge organization tools that was developed during this time called intermediate. Intermediate was a hyper media tool developed at Brown University between 1985 and 1991. The tool, the project was accompanied by by a team of both computer scientists and ethnographers who produced research papers about how it was received as well collected documentary footage. In this project, the team describes intermediate as a vision to create a vast multimedia information environment, or no piece of information is ever isolated, and where every word picture and idea can be linked to any other. Intermediate was not so much one tool as it was a suite of applications which explains its kind of plural name. There's a sense of this from the screenshot here, where you can see on the left of web that was created which links out to multiple documents on 19th century health records, and each of the documents themselves linked to each other. And then over on the right you can see a kind of like history of all the different kinds of edits and linkages that people were creating and building. So, in the ethnographic report students referred to working with intermediate as going to intermediate, because all the intermediate terminals were housed in one room. So to them, this experience of intermediate was not as much the software as it was the content held in the software as it was the physical space that house it was this kind of total experience. The first intermediate pilot with two was with two classes at Brown, an English survey course and a biology course. The two courses were selected as a proof of concept of the flexibility of the system. If the same tool could be used to enhance learning in the distinct cultures of the sciences and the humanities, then surely it would be useful to a broader selection of courses. The professors for the each course and the research team together built an entire corpus of reference materials for the work before the before the courses began, inputting and linking hundreds of documents together. Students could contribute their own content to their to the intermediate environment by adding their own writing by linking elements from their own or others work together were inputting other resource materials. While students and educators often had a range of experiences using intermediate over the course of the entire semester. The learning outcomes of engaging with this tool were considered largely quite successful, both in terms of students performance on exams for the biology course, as well as the kind of depth of connection making and discussion for the students in the English course. So this is one example of the types of experiments that was occurring during this time. This is I talk about two other significant hyper media knowledge organization tools from this era. One is called Cecil which later turned into a tool called knowledge forum, and another called hypercard which was not explicitly educational but was used quite a bit in educational contexts. Looking across the research studies from from throughout these three tools, and about the various ways they were used in classrooms at this time, a few kind of patterns of frictions become clear. So, many of these early experiments required so much preset up like intermediate where professors and a team of workers entered a huge amount of material before the course began. So, some of these early experiments were themselves successful and learners had positive experiences. They were typically quite unrealistic to imagine setting up at any larger scale. Furthermore, there was quite a significant number of technical challenges with using these tools as well. So, operating networks computer labs at that point was expensive and not what not yet a norm. So, loading and interacting with network systems could at times be incredibly slow and cumbersome. And this was particularly a big problem for intermediate. And then for many just becoming familiar with interacting with the computer was was a new experience and required significant onboarding time. So that's like a little picture of this mid 1980s moment. So moving forward now. I'll describe kind of a moment, a bit of the time in between and then we'll jump to the 2000s. So, despite the, the failure of the tools from the 1980s and early 90s to gain widespread traction in classrooms. By the mid 1990s, it was becoming increasingly clear that the world was rapidly changing alongside developments and mass popularizations of computers and the early Internet. In particular educational discourse, there were a plurality of descriptions of what this future computer enabled world would look like and notions of how to adapt educational practices in order to better prepare learners for this new landscape. By 2005, the broad shift toward a more highly interactive Internet, only further fueled excitement about participatory web based learning tools. The broad shift in how websites were designed was described as web 2.0, a term used for new websites that were structured to enable user generated and participatory content interactions with things like the growth of social media blogs and video sharing sites. At the same time, a broad and interdisciplinary pedagogical approach called computer supported collaborative learning or CSCL was beginning to gain significantly more traction. The approaches which build upon a combination of educational psychology, instructional technology and social psychology. Learning occurs through social interactions using shared digital spaces where learners collaboratively construct knowledge using technology as their primary means of communication or as a shared resource. Though the CSCL community had existed for a few decades, the availability of more collaborative platforms on the Internet led to a significant expansion in the CSCL community and its research. Many educational researchers across CL and other disciplines took this collaborative potential and growing popularity of the Internet and imagined how these tools could be used in concert with a broadly constructivist learning strategies to enable learners to more effectively participate in a network society. So of these new web 2.0 platforms that were rapidly growing in popularity, the wiki became a format onto which researchers began to imagine new possibilities for developing collaborative learning experiences in the classroom. So while everyone is likely familiar with Wikipedia, which is the most widely known wiki, wikis generally are wikis more broadly are a kind of general form of hypertext publication that is collaboratively edited and managed directly inside of the web browser. Wikis themselves run wiki engines, many of which are freely open source and could be readily tinkered with by researchers and educators. So, while on the kind of first section of my thesis I looked at kind of a spread of different tools and how they were used in classrooms. In this chapter I typically I focus on wikis as a kind of general model, which were and continue to be used in a wide variety of different learning contexts. So, there are a few, there are a number of aspects of how wikis are designed that are particularly appeal to this kind of constructivist approach. Like earlier hypermedia models wikis allow users to organize and present content in a way that does not prescribe a set organizational form at the outset, and can allow for kind of organic growth. These use pages as nodes which can refer to each other to form a network which does not need to be predetermined. This offers the potential for students to build out wikis as they follow self directed learning, adding or linking new pages as they potentially follow their own interests. So, beginning around 2005 educators and researchers proposed and developed a wide variety of learning experiences which brought wikis into the classroom across a variety of different maturities of learners across different subject areas and across context. So I'll talk about a few sort of like general models of wikis that were used in education. The first is a resource wiki. Resource wikis are collaborative knowledge bases where learners contribute to their contribute their knowledge to an expanding encyclopedic resource. Resource wikis are typically more outward facing, meaning that they're less intended to contain in progress documentation of learning processes, and instead are able to function as a knowledge base that could be legible and potentially useful to external readers beyond the class itself. Students might be assigned to creating specific article style entries, integrating text and images and attribution to cited articles. These types of wikis are intended to perform like Wikipedia as a resource containing reliably sourced information. One one related genre of wiki usage involves presentation wikis, which are a way of using wikis to create and document in progress learning and knowledge in a format that is less concerned with being presentable to an outsider and more focused on being useful for learners. Presentation wikis have more room for individuals to use their own writing styles and tones. And while while learners using presentation wikis will link their pages and ideas together, it's more likely to be intentionally parent who developed each page on the wiki in order to assess the contributors as well. Presentation wikis are more likely to have segmented areas where contributors are working individually or collaboratively in private spaces, where more finished work will kind of be added to the publicly accessible zone upon completion. And one third example of using wikis that I'll mention just briefly is using them for co writing as an opportunity to bring students away from the kind of traditional solitary mode of written work and toward collective writing processes which offer not only opportunities for to practice reading and writing but involve critical thinking reflection and like regular interaction. Reflecting on the years of research using wikis in classrooms, there are a number of different kinds of challenges in using them that stand out from the challenges that the tools in the mid 80s dealt with. One significant one was that evaluating both performance and individuals contributions in this context is very difficult for shared and collaborative spaces. These evaluations became increasingly crucial during the 2005 forward era of heightened standardized testing and no child left behind. Secondly, more meta research from 2009 and so onward indicated that in many cases learners didn't actually display deeply collaborative behaviors using them. So this was often the case where when students like procrastinate they vastly reduce the possibility for collaboration. Like when working against the time crunch students are like less likely to take the time to reflect on each other's work or thoughtfully cross reference between wiki pages and are much more likely to focus on just finishing their own content. Furthermore, working with limited time learners don't typically can't typically give in progress feedback to their peers. Furthermore, wikis themselves typically by default are much more stripped down than than some of the earlier tools even than the ones described in the 80s in the sense that they don't have built in modes of visualizing networks of ideas and and where content or individual nodes can only live in one place rather than a plurality of them at once. And then one final one final friction in classrooms was that discussion areas on wikis are typically separated out from the content areas and so having deeper discussions was challenging to point to specific specific notes in the wiki. All right. So now I'm going to shift gears a little bit and talks about some of the contemporary hyper media tools for knowledge organization, some of the features of them and then describe kind of three applications that I see them being used in today's classrooms. As I mentioned at the at the opening of this presentation there there have been a variety of new types of tools which draw upon this nonlinear network oriented model of documenting and organizing knowledge. The design of this recent generation of tools combines many of the important design aspects from each of the previous points that I examined earlier. So, like the mid 2000s kind of wiki moment, these recent hyper media knowledge organization tools are are are accessible and primarily browser based. They are synchronously editable meaning that users can actually see each other's changes in real time. But these tools also borrow a lot of the design decisions from the 80s as well. Many of which emphasize the importance of multi contextuality where one idea can simultaneously link out to multiple places at once rather than kind of one directional link. They prioritize creating and connecting smaller nodes of information. So, while with the wiki where the page was kind of the individual node that could connect to other pages. Many of these contemporary tools prioritize creating and connecting smaller chunks of information together like individual bullet points or individual images. And then finally, many of these emerging platforms offer multiple ways of creating and viewing the connections between information and their relationships as well. So often employing graph used to kind of visualize nodes of interconnection. So, the final section of my thesis then asks, where might these ideas and platforms fit into classrooms today and how can we learn from some of these frictions of previous tools. I identify three possible ways that I see these contemporary tools being used that avoid some of the aforementioned frictions and the each of these models are inspired by practices that I've seen people using online. The first is the concept of creating a digital garden. So, digital gardens are online spaces that look something like a combination of a notebook and a blog. Digital gardeners write essays or short form pieces and use back links at the end of each page to point to other pieces inside their garden to connect to the piece that the reader is currently reading to others. It's like a kind of personal website or a blog with the added notion that the written pieces are intentionally interlinked together. And this kind of garden metaphor implies that the connections on each page as well as the content itself will be tended to and that the posts themselves are meant to be final but can grow later on. Digital gardens are a model that could be useful in a variety of contexts. But for an example, a middle school aged learner in an English class could use a digital garden to write not only their homework assignments essays and creative work in one shared space and could be encouraged to explicitly make connections between these different forms. This model is developed by an individual rather than a group and is more focused on organizing and sharing work that a learner has themselves created rather than inputting knowledge created by others. So this has the benefit of giving teachers a space with which to evaluate the students work as they use the tool. A second approach is using these shared knowledge organization tools for creating collaborative research repositories. So using these tools learners that are part of a class or group of classes can collectively gather organize and annotate external materials that will be useful for research and writing that will be developed separately. This is a type of practice that I've seen on one of the tools called arena that I examined previously. This type of model will allow students to help each other gather materials that will be useful for their own individual work and in doing so builds a shared system that is potentially useful to the entire class as a whole. And while this model is inherently collaborative. It's in a kind of pre writing context that avoids the challenges of needing to figure out how to grade individual students on their contributions. And then the third model that I talked about, which is what I explore in a little bit more depth in a case study is using networked tools to support social emotional learning in classrooms. This model is inspired by a project that I worked on with the playful journey lab at MIT in collaboration with a seventh grade Massachusetts area public middle school classroom in the fall. We used a tool called realm research, which is one of the contemporary tools that I go over in the thesis to host an activity series format that focused on collaborative reflection in order to support students and teachers to acknowledge a kind of wide variety of experiences and types of learning that that happened throughout the pandemic. The types of prompts that we designed involved virtual making and collaborative writing that that that also incorporated like drawing simple video making and taking pictures. The intention was that students would come away from this activity series with this co created collection of shared artifacts that captured this moment in their lives that led to like deeper discussion and that helped expand their ideas of what learning is. And in doing so, they worked in this kind of shared knowledge environment over the course of a semester. Using using these tools in this context is again kind of outside of a context that requires grading, and also further further encourages collaboration and connection forming. And also using using these tools for a shared social emotional space could be a way to help learners in distance learning environments as well. Also, also developing an activity series in this using this format is a way of avoiding some of the procrastination problems that Wikipedia or the sorry that wikis often dealt with. I could talk a lot more about this specific project, but I'm going to kind of start to start to wrap up. Looking at both the history and present moment of network tools in the context of learning. My hope today is to kind of leave you with a gentle optimism about their potential. While I don't see these tools on their own as as radically or fundamentally transforming educational practices. I see that there clearly is a design space that can be continued to be explored using these types of tools to support learners in a variety of different contexts. So I think that taking a tinkerers approach to looking at the past configurations of the genre of tool and carefully examining the contexts within which they can be employed is is essential to using them to create change. And then ultimately what what is more most important is is less the tools themselves but a careful consideration of how they fit into the environments in which we use them. Thank you all so much. Thank you to Eric and Justin for for all of your help as well as everybody here and take a sip of water. All right, open for questions. Eric. Thanks well I enjoyed hearing your presentation there and of course going through this this journey with you. My question is really is a little bit of a little bit of a hypothetical situation but I'll sort of ask in the context of the sort of the tinker and the charismatic. And so you should have documented this case of of tinkering over decades in this in this space of hyper media with respect to schools. So imagine, imagine that you can take one of the tools used for mentioned on the last slide there perhaps the one they used the schools room and and bring it back to a 1980s classroom. So here you are you're the charismatic who can bring this this technology of the future to the classroom. Is it to be more effective than the things that they were using at the time. And the context of my question is like, is it is it the process of tinkering that's important, or is it the product of tinkering that's important that it would get to that place through this for these years of tinkering. Yeah, I think it I think it has to be a combination in the sense that I think just even even dropping one of these contemporary tools, even if you also brought with it, like the, you know, the computers to it to that point would still I think there would still be a lot of kinds of frictions encountered I think that like, it's this process of tinkering over the course of many years that develops a kind of like language around how to how to bring them into classrooms, and like pedagogical approaches that that like are carefully considered over over the course of years that that find their fit at a certain point. And so I think that, while while, while some of the tools at that point where it was themselves quite effective. I think that it's, it's yeah the kind of process of tinkering that that it's important. Yeah. Thanks. Well thanks that was that was terrific, a brilliant history and one I want to learn a lot more about can't wait to read it. Just to pick up on Eric's question, and the very last point you made where you said it's more about the fit. It's less about the tools and it's more about the fit in the context. I think it's just another way to read, like the, the information you've amassed is as a moment in a zeitgeist a moment in the kind of technological remapping of how consciousness works on how learning works. If you were to jump back a century and a half, you know when photography was the hot medium. There's a lot of emphasis being put on like well can we learn with slides can we learn with image how does the mind work. There's this kind of pod to do between the representation systems that are being used in the classroom, and the model of how mental processes work, like well we hold images or it's a blank slate or it's a photographic memory. That's a discourse that's really big in the, in the, in the mid 19th century. And it strikes me as just the kind of the. And this goes to Eric's point in question I guess like there is a kind of zeitgeist, a paradigm and notion of how consciousness works that we that we technologically emulate. And it's not whether the tool is good or bad it's whether that fit. It strikes me there was so apt the last thing you said it's less the tools and more the fit in the context. I'm using context in a different way than you used it, but I think it's still, it still kind of works. I don't know if you, any reactions to that or whatever but it just strikes me as a brilliant meditation on our thinking about the learning process and our thinking about the functioning of consciousness through technology as the lens. Yeah, that's a really interesting point I think that. I mean I was quite struck by the fact that like this this like associative metaphor and this like image of these like interconnected documents is like persisted now for me. And Nelson kind of was developing that that model in the 60s and like we're like you see these brand new tools that are claimed that like pretend to be entirely a historical that are like referencing this exact same diagram. So, and I and I'm, it's something that I wonder like if, if perhaps it's like through, you know, now, however many years been get deep engagement with the internet that like, maybe that this model is more ready to be used than it had been previously that like the types of maybe we're starting to see cracks in the system and that you gave me three examples that you're focusing on and one was the garden. Like if like there's not an ecological model that's starting to displace this technological computational model. Like, say another doubles advocate. It's appealing to a new metaphor, and it's a more organic, more organic one. Yeah, I mean, I've seen that's something that I know a little bit at the end of the thesis that I that I see this kind of gardening metaphor actually used quite a bit more in relation to these tools that that might even perhaps like kind of overtake the sort of network metaphor down the road. And that's something. Yeah, that's something I would love to see happen. Justin. Thanks Will. This has been really terrific. Can everybody hear me okay. Yep. I wanted to, you know, a terrific history, lots of great connections and Eric can win questions about quite a bit. One challenge I wanted to offer is that it sounded like in your final piece, you were saying something along the lines of, if we could get teachers to choose the right kind of projects to do with Rome research, then that would create some of the problems with previous generations, which just makes me think that that's an argument that it was the projects in previous generations that were wrong. I wonder if you could talk about what thoughts you have an alternative view that it's not that the projects were wrong, nor is it the case that you could pick the perfect Rome projects and have them fit. There's a series of values in schools that are orthogonal to the values of learning and participating with these tools. Right. I think that, yeah, that's a great point. So, yeah, I think that the that that it is true that often the values of schools absolutely are a fagmal to effectively using these types of tools. I guess what I'm trying to propose is that there are still ways of using them in inside of the existing kind of structures of schools that can still be effective. I don't know if that completely answers your question. Well, yeah, I think I think you just should do that as well just something like, I can't change schools. So, but there's probably like little niches where where sufficiently devoted people will make this work. So here are some great ways of doing that. And I think that's good too. Although, although I think that, you know, they're there, you know, that which is a which is a great way of continuing to develop really interesting pedagogy for the Coalition of the willing. And I'm interested whether Rome or whether you know garden metaphors or what other kinds of things might expand that coalition to the willing in interesting ways. Yeah, I mean I think that I think that expanding the coalition of the willing is I guess kind of where where I'm sort of leaving this off, I guess, in the sense that I definitely don't see like any mass proliferation of the uses of these types of tools, happening in directly inside of classrooms like happening anytime soon. But I think that the that finding these finding these kind of design language or finding these new configurations I think can like help expand who the who the willing are what that coalition is, and the type of uses for them. I have a somewhat tangential question but I as a historian and documentary and I couldn't let this pass. You mentioned that the that the project at Brown in the late 80s. It also involved documentary footage. Yes. Can you tell me a bit more about that was there a documentary made about it or is it. Yes, there was I can actually send it yeah it's a great documentary because it interestingly enough there wasn't like a ton of visual documentation of the project. So that so the documentary really helped me out a lot in trying to understand what was happening at that point. There was a lot of quite a few interviews with students at Brown about their experience working with the tool. I didn't, I didn't have time to mention it today but there was like quite a few interesting anecdotes like some students felt like using this shared network to help their studying was cheating. They would use these materials instead of textbook materials, somehow like gave them a better score on their on their tests like wasn't an authentic way of learning. And there were other, there were other little anecdotes about from the English class about students feeling like their ideas were getting less like individual creative people were getting reduced to the kind of mean creativity of the classroom, which was kind of unexpected point that I thought was interesting. It was really fascinating. I'd be happy to send it. Great. Thanks. Well, let's give Will a round of applause.