Defective or enlightening?
It's not the best whiteboard in the world, because nothing is ever truly erased.
Here our class sketch for a mobile app is the latest overlay on countless earlier class discussions.
I really like that. Today's work builds on what came before. Then when we're done, a trace of what we did remains.
This sub-par piece of technology may have something to teach us about life.
Palimpsest
According to Wikipedia, a palimpsest is a manuscript page from a scroll or book from which the text has been scraped off and which can be used again.
Romans wrote on wax-coated tablets that could be smoothed and reused in a similar way. A child's Magic Slate is a modern version of the same idea. As is our whiteboard.
At right a digitally processed image of a page from a 13th century manuscript called the Archimedes Palimpsest looks a lot like our whiteboard.
Thanks, Google, for pointing this out, along with a book called Palimpsest
