The education scholar is asked why ideas about the overhead projector settled so quickly. It just worked, he says, and he contrasts it with today's software textbooks, which change constantly and now come with AI features he thinks mostly make them worse.
Yeah, you need a new firmware update for that. For that projector.
…settle and normalize? And it's like we spend a little bit of time. Everybody goes to the training, they learn, don't write too much text, have simple layouts, and it kind of calcifies. Like, it doesn't seem like there's a ton of new ideas about overhead projectors for a very long time after this. I
…software. And as a result, textbooks are constantly changing. And for the most part, most textbooks today have AI stuff embedded in them for better and worse. I would argue largely for worse, right? That they're bloated and don't actually function in the same way that the textbook that I went to school with and that I used with my students operated in the past. And so, in some ways, right, the kind of beautiful nature of the overhead projector is it functioned exactly as you needed it to. And assuming that the bulb was working and that you had a cord that was long enough to reach the wall, you knew exactly what it was going to do and is always going to do it in that way, right? Like the thing that you have displayed next to you worked exactly how it did 60 years ago. And assuming you can still have a bulb 60 years from now, will continue to do exactly what it does now.
Yeah. And I think that that winds up being A, a huge part of its power and B, a huge part of why it was very hard to get rid of for better and for worse, even once we maybe had something better, which actually kind of leads to sort of the next moment in the story, which is we get to about 1985. And…
Where are you imagining the overhead projector popping up? Like, do you want one in your living room? This is going to be my question
to you. I'm