That makes a lot of sense. I think there’s plenty of research to back up your claim about writing helping memory, too. I used to try to remember things better by (1) writing it down, (2) reading it aloud, (3) thinking about the next level up.
Number 3 is probably less useful outside fields where you’re constantly trying to “scale” systems… but in any case, it’s a thought experiment that happens to be really good at exposing the boundaries of concepts. Like… “okay, I built one server… now, what if I needed to manage a farm of 1000? What issues then become more pronounced?”
Out of curiosity, do any of these platforms try to marry itself with paper workflows? Maybe stuff like:
- teachers can submit a printable paper doc
- students can print it out as needed, submit the finished result
- students can take pictures of their handwritten notes and store them in a digital journal
- platform comes with handwriting analysis, full-text-search, … all that jazz?