Memex

The reciprocity of teaching and learning spaces is significant here. Compare this design to traditional classrooms where only the Teacher has the Big Desk, a design that is re-created in online learning using a Content Management System.

Imagined by Vannevar Bush in "As We May Think," in 1945, the memex is a desk-sized scholar workstation containing a microfilm library. Text and images are displayed on two screens, and can be annotated by hand.

Most importantly, texts and images can be linked, so that bringing up a text on one screen brings up a linked text on the other. These links can be organized into trails, and the trails shared with others.

Bush's design for the Steelcase memex suggests that online teachers and learners work at reciprocal workspaces. It's not a matter of the teacher has the big desk and student at the small one; they both use their own memex as a Personal Learning Environment.

Part of learning, then, is creating and learning to use this personal workspace with the guidance of an instructor - as a glassblower creates her studio and a botanist her lab.

The memex (a portmanteau of "memory" and "index") is the name of the hypothetical proto-hypertext system that Vannevar Bush described in his 1945 The Atlantic Monthly article As We May Think.

Bush envisioned the memex as a device in which individuals would compress and store all of their books, records, and communications, "mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility." The memex would provide an "enlarged intimate supplement to one's memory".

The concept of the memex influenced the development of early hypertext systems (eventually leading to the creation of the World Wide Web) and personal knowledge base software.

The hypothetical implementation depicted by Bush for the purpose of concrete illustration was based upon a document bookmark list of static microfilm pages, and lacked a true hypertext system where parts of pages would have internal structure beyond the common textual format.

Early electronic hypertext systems were thus inspired by memex rather than modeled directly upon it - wikipedia