I’ve been told off over the last couple of days for not updating my site so I thought I’d share a thought I’ve been considering, rolling around my head for a while now. It’s not something that I know would work, something that’s confirmed but the plus side is that it’s something that I’ve never seen anywhere before.

My thought is concerning developments in electronic paper and how it could be used to help in teaching and more importantly, make learning more enjoyable. The issue came to light as I sat in a tedious and slow lecture on Political Philosophy. The room, filled with eager young students (!), had curtains drawn over the windows, air conditioning running, fluorescent lights running and an overhead projector beaming the slides onto the wall display above my Professor. The scene is replicated in thousands of rooms across the world where students slave away and teachers swelter. In thinking about this I realised what a waste of energy we were: why not just open the curtains? The answer is of course because the sun would be too bright to see the display properly and so we close the curtains so we can closely regulate the amount of light blinding the great Prof.
I think electronic paper could help us in this situation. Currently these new displays are paper thin screens that appear to act in a way similar to TFTs. What they in fact do is that, instead of lighting up like an Liquid Crystal Display would do, when a current is applied they rotate a molecule which has differing colours/hues in different parts of it. This means that they give off no light of their own and they need to consume less energy because they aren’t spitting out light but just reflecting it. What’s even more interesting is that they only use energy when they change the image: when the display is static the image holds. Like an Etch A Sketch, they keep whatever was applied to them until you shake them all around and begin again. This all applies to the classroom because of the simple fact that Powerpoint is boring. It’s that simple. People very rarely use video or beautiful images with their lecture slides and so a electronic-paper style device would be perfect because the slides don’t have to change constantly. At the moment electronic paper is having difficulty in moving images and with colour, although this is being improved constantly and colour is coming soon.

The major plus of all of this is that electronic paper displays are incredibly easy to read from a distance, from side angles and in direct sunlight and in dim light. This all amounts to their being perfect for replacing projector displays as a perfect display medium for lectures. The room could be properly lit, have lower power consumption and air conditioning needs because you wouldn’t have to use as much artificial lighting within a deliberately darkened room! Of course there’s the problem that the displays aren’t even in large scale production and it hasn’t been shown that they can be made in large sizes, but if they could, I’d propose this as a perfect application.
The future though, could be so great. A class where you can see through a window, where the screen doesn’t have to be rated in thousands of lumens just to be read properly, where you can hear a lecturer over the hum of speaker noise, air conditioning fans and associated paraphernalia, a future where we don’t have to darken a room just to light it.
Fingers crossed!

ScienCentral: Electronic Paper

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