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Gates' Future of Education Straight Out of '60s
theodp writes "Bill Gates really should have talked more with ex-Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie. While Khan Academy's new self-paced exercises, coach management options, and game mechanics (merit badges/points) prompted Gates to gush to the high-rollers at Salman Khan's TED Talk that they 'just got a glimpse of the future of education,' Ozzie's seen this movie before, having written similarly-featured PLATO courseware as a student at Illinois. In the '70s. On plasma terminals. With touch screens. Fifty years ago last Friday, 27-year-old EE PhD whiz kid Don Bitzer and partner Peter Braunfeld demonstrated the nascent PLATO system to assembled dignitaries at the 'President's Faculty Conference on Improving Our Educational Aims in the Sixties.' Hey, everything old is new again! Gates is hardly the only tech luminary who don't-know-much-about-PLATO-history — CS Prof Daniel Sleator felt compelled to school the Web's founders on PLATO in '94."
Just because something existed in the 70's doesn't necessarily mean people should have known about it or that it had any impact on future developments.
The wheel of time turns, moving from one age to the next. History falls to myth, myth to legend, legend to half remembered tales spoken around the fire, and eventually, long after even that is forgotten, that age comes again.
Here's what I'd like to spend my tax payer money on:
Hire the countries best teachers and graphics artists, and have them create the absolute highest quality educational videos money can buy. Then, put them in the public domain.
You only have to create the videos once... it's a one time investment. Then distribute them over BT, or YouTube, or DVD, or whatever people want to do. Free college level education for everyone!
PLATO was a pretty big and influential system. Education was its primary task, but the educational software paled compared to the games. I think Jetfight was Bruce Artwick's first flight sim (someone will wikicorrect me, no doubt), and it was multiplayer from the start. The first online, single-instance multiplayer graphical FRPG (Aka MMORPG, although probably would be more correctly called a protoroguelike) was Moria, and it featured the joys of permadeath.
The fact that it didn't really catch on as the answer to technology in education should tell us something about those who keep going back to this model for learning.
Good. Since it's 50 year old technology, maybe the teachers unions won't block it for 10 years like they do with all other technology changes...
Did you really think that Gates is capable of coming up with an original idea? Even as he attempts to revise and groom his image for history, he remains unable to innovate.
Apparently Bill never saw the episode where Bart is mistaken for a genius after he steals Martin Prince's IQ test answers and gets sent to a genius school. The entire foundation of teaching over there was based on this system.
I was bored in regular classes, and I was even more bored in my EIP (Expansion of Interest) classes. Once our teacher realized we had little interest in the assigned weekly discussion topics, she set us loose with logic puzzles and Carmen San Diego instead. On the other hand, as an adult this might be a great way to brush up on all the stuff I missed in middle school and high school because I was so bored...
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
With success defined as being stupid like the kardashins or snooki, why would anyone study. Everyone wants to be rich & drunk and all you have to do is be outrageous. Until we as a society decide its important to be smart, its all for naught. Kids are not stupid. Sheen has just discovered it and is now making more being crazy than ever before. Even facebook, I mean really how hard was that compared to say designing an ARM for supercomputers like china did. Until we reward things that are actually useful to society, we will continue to fade from the world. I mean look how stupid mcCain looked last week on that talk show when he actually thought ipads were MADE in the USA?? Foxconn dummy.
Yesterday I consumed food, drank liquids, brushed my teeth, showered, and slept. I also breathed.
I guess I'd better not do any of those things today, or I'm "doomed to repeat" myself.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
PLATO terminals were cool, but they cost about one human teacher annual salary at the time, and needed a mainframe costing 100 human teacher years behind them, plus telecom links that were obscenely expensive by current standards. They were barely economically feasible only if you assumed large cost drops from volume production.
Comparing PLATO to modern internet distance learning is like comparing the Wright flyer to a modern jet aircraft.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
How much does PLATO charge?
How much does Khan charge?
What technology was available to the majority of consumers in the 60s?
What technology is available to the majority of consumers today?
All innovation is incremental. The implementation of the details is the key factor to determining whether the incremental innovation is revolutionary. The details include appropriateness for society. Although not much has changed in the past 50 years (we still eat, sleep, and breathe as we always will), enough has changed to make a low-cost implementations, such as Khan and others, viable solutions to changing the pedagogy of the modern classroom.
Objection! OP is quoting "The Fellowship of the Ring"
Some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend. Legend became myth. And for forty years, PLATO passed out of all knowledge.
For those who really care -- Plato (emulated) is still online.
Cyber1
The main difference I've seen in Khan Academy is in the quality of the lectures. Most (all) videos I've seen are horrible. The tutorials on Khan are clear, straightforward, and informative with no fluff or embarrassingly lame animations. The several people I've talked to that used Khan found the tutorials to be even better than their own instructor's classroom lectures (they were taking calc, Diff Eq's, and linear algebra). I recommend Khan for that reason.
Let's face it - Gates was lucky.
IBM let him sell his copy of DOS.
Businesses decided to standardize on DOS PCs over Macs, making Microsoft a success, despite a weak product.
Ever since then business, education and government have been happy to shell out the "Microsoft Tax" every time there's a new release of Windows or Office. Most of Microsoft's non-core ventures have been colossal failures. Yet, because this man was in the right place, at the right time and was given mountains of lucre for products which were less than stellar, he's accorded that status of a Technology Genius and all around Brilliant Guy.
Really. He's just rich. Just like Mark Zuckerberg will be when the Facebook IPO happens. Don't get your expectations up, just because someone has a lot of money.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Simply because the idea or a previously failing implementation of something happen decades or even hundreds of years prior, does not mean a new application of the same idea won't work later on.
Some ideas are ahead of their time for social reasons; others for technological reasons and still others simply because of bad marketing. There are lots of reasons for things to not go over well at first and later become successful. (Aspartame was rejected several times before Dick Cheney got it approved by the FDA somehow... okay, bad example.)
While knowledge of previous success or failure of old ideas is useful, maintaining the belief that it was bad then so it's bad now is probably counter-productive. I can't say that it ever happened, but I imagine that the first attempt at "the wheel" weren't all that great either.
Indeed, Bill Gates is winning like a boss, unlike failtrolls who fail at trolling.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wheel_of_Time
As near as I can determine, of the seven links in the synopsis, the second one is closest to the TFA, with the rest being background information. However, that link is directly to the TED talk, not to commentary on how this idea was already alive in the 60s. The closest thing to an article pointing out the similarity of the Khan Academy process to PLATO seems to be the synopsis itself (with a lovely photo linked from Flickr).
Is this an original observation by theodp, or did an article get lost in pile?
No one is going to click the 7 separate links to try to piece together a non-story. If anyone is wondering what this is or why this got posted to slashdot, I've got your answer:
Someone presented something about using computers and shit for education.
Bill Gates likes what the presented.
Someone on the internet cried "OLD! We've been using computers in education, for like, YEARS now!", despite knowing nothing of the differences between what was shown then (utter trash) and what was shown now (mildly decent tools).
theodp submitted a link farm, as usual, to slashdot, and it got approved, as usual. Probably because he threw in some shit about Gates "gushing" over it - read Gates's tweets, he's like this for anything he supports.
theodp is also the submitter behind such recent "greats" as:
Microsoft Patent Deems Comic Books Shameful
Stopping The Horror of 'Reply All'
Nokia Has a Billion Reasons to Love WP7
Dawn of the TED Dead
Microsoft Rewarding Employees Who Phone It In
Do Hobbies Decrease Chances of CS Success?
Is Google Poisoning PDF?
Basically, theodp submits a lot of linkfarm shit, averaging about 5.5 hyperlinks per submission. The "story" is often fud, non-news, or general flamebait/shit-stirring involving hot button topics.
"Just because something existed in the 70's doesn't necessarily mean people should have known about it or that it had any impact on future developments" ..
They should know if they are in the business of making pronouncements on such ..
“I think you just got a glimpse of the future of education,” said Mr. Gates, as Mr. Khan left the stage.
The PLATO system pushed the hardware envelope for its day, Orson Scott Card dreamed a remarkable interactive classroom in the 80's, and I was involved in a teaching research project in the 80's which used ultra-low-cost systems for computer-aided teaching. It's a theme many people have worked on. It's a theme that (ultimately) is a useful tool, but falls short of being "revolutionary" -- because it's existed (in one form or another) for centuries. It's an iteration, not a leap. It's homework.
Computer courseware can adjust the difficulty of problems to target an area where the student is having difficulty, and it can also present homework that has a visual / animated aspect to it (2 + 1 = ... dots flow together on the screen ... 3). In the end, though, it's just giving the student practice using concepts which were demonstrated by someone else. It can present facts in more interesting ways than a book, but it's still the same information you get from textbooks. You can tell a computer you "need help," and get a pre-packaged review, but you can't ask it a question.
There is certainly a place for computer-based homework in the classroom, and the company I worked with even had some excellent results helping children with learning disabilities to keep up with the rest of the class. Computers can help a good teacher manage a larger classroom effectively (potentially lowering education costs) ... but making education better? That will take more understanding of the psychology behind learning and memory, not better hardware.
In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there's a big difference.
Where are you from? And exactly how long have you been on this planet, dood? PLATO sucked royally and big time -- that programmed instruction was another simpleton corporate scam, exactly what Gates is trying to do, privatize all education, because the much smarter Steve Jobs wisely began investing in getting Apples into the schools and now they are the computer of choice, across the spectrum. 'Nuff said....
When I was a kid, I got invited to take a (short) computer camp one summer, due to my grades. Turns out, it was on the University's PLATO system.
So cool! I learned to program in Pascal on that system. Also played games.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
That's right, it's all about getting the teachers no matter how bad they are more of the hard working tax payers money.
It isn't your money. When you buy a pack of gum, is it still your money? No. The money belongs to the person who sold you the gum. When you live in a society, the money you pay for the privilege is no longer your money. You exchanged the money for your citizenship rights. If you don't like the bargain, shop around and see if you can do any better. If not, that's not our problem.
Teachers make crap money. Government workers make crap money. Instead of coming after the little guy who is just trying to get by, why not go after the people who are really eating your lunch, the corporate CEOs? Here's a little joke for you. A Wall Street CEO, a Teahadist, and a teacher sit down to enjoy a plate of a dozen cookies. The CEO takes eleven cookies. When the Teahadist looks at him, aghast, the CEO says, "Hey! Watch out for that teacher. He wants part of YOUR cookie!"
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
self-paced study courses have a major problem. They need a specific type of student. The student must be exactly smart enough to easily learn the material, yet dumb enough not to play the system to "get it over with."
Self-paced study material can be a major frustration for students who need a little more help (perhaps to have a concept presented differently) or who need more practice. If a student does not grasp something quickly enough, a rapid demoralization occurs and learning stops.
When smarter students becomes bored, they too become frustrated and learn ways to play the courseware. That rapidly supplants learning the material.
Self-paced learning is absolutely not a solution to a major need in education.It can't replace stand-up training. BG should spend some time and get himself an education degree and then spend a few years teaching before making grand pronouncements. He has no qualifications to speak on this subject.
The Baker Electric Automobile was in production from 1899 to 1914 -- I guess electric cars were not and never will be competitive with gasoline and diesel powered vehicles. What? Better batteries? Better motors? You mean that the technology has caught up and electric cars might now be viable?
Maybe Plato was just ahead of the available technology.
He also brought us Microsoft Bob, Windows 95 (based on DOS shit), the blue screen of death, and DEVELOPERS. No wait, that was Ballmer.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Bill, you don't understand education. You didn't take the time to understand children, teenagers, sociology, social psychology, pedagogy, performance/theater, linguistics, or any other field necessary to comprehend what a teacher is and just spend your time and money looking for a silver bullet cure to any ailments.
First, Bill tried to give away millions to students to pay for their college education. Of course, it came in the form of competitive scholarships so those who were already destined to receive a bunch of money (because of a strong educational history and innate brilliance) simply got more. This made no change.
Then came the funding of techno-super schools. But they were neither in areas in need of improvement nor were the schools any cheaper (more expensive, obviously) to run. Another failure.
Bill, if you want to make a change, do this:
Create a system for the development of teachers. Not super-teachers or techno-teachers-- just teachers. At the moment there is no hub for potential teachers to go to that catalogs all the credential or master's programs. There's no easier step-by-step guide for the process in California. Everyone just quotes a vague order of things.
Also, if you don't want to help the creation of teachers (and hell, give grants to pay for their wages!), then try just funding the modest renovation of crap-hole schools and class rooms in low-income neighborhoods.
If you want to make a change, help the poor. It's that easy.
On June 3, 2010, the Computer History Museum hosted a 6-session conference on the PLATO learning system, all of the videos are up in the Computer History Museum channel. Search on youtube.com for 'Computer History Museum Plato'. There were several later model terminals (still orange plasma and touch screen) running off of a modern PC emulating the CDC mainframe.
I'd rather be lucky then smart.
After all, Bill Gates is a College Dropout.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The Webs Founders!?!?
My Ass!
- Dan.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
I wonder if some of those posting comments here have tried the videos and the exercises?
I'm 67 years old, retired, never great at math but thought it was interesting.
I started watching the videos 4 months ago, and I've gotten through the Khan math videos up to 1/3 the way through calculus.
It's not difficult the way he teaches it. And, as he says, you can test yourself.
Two of my grandkids (8 and 10 years old) are working on it and enjoying it.
Honestly I think the whole idea is inspiring.
Especially the chance to let teachers teach students one-on-one.
And the chance to have students teach each other.
My recommendation to anybody reading this: try it, it's fantastic!
Gates's not Gates' in title...
PLATO was just a platform. The PLATO Project never created any courseware of its own. It merely taught professors how to write their own courseware. They told them pretty baldly what they (PLATO folks) thought worked, and what didn't, but the results were up to the courseware authors, and their students were stuck with the results. Some were drill'n'practice types, some did thoughtful, exploratory stuff, and some (to my mind the most successful) wrote laboratory-emulation software that let the students run experiments on their own on stuff that would cost too much or take too long in the real world. PLATO's big showpiece was a bio lab called "fly" that let students breed fruit flies in emulation and see how traits were inherited. No hint of drill'n'practice or programmed courseware in sight.
PLATO lessons, like textbooks, came in good, indifferent, and truly stinky varieties. The reason people remember the games is that they operated under rapid and ruthless natural selection...unlike courseware.
Who does this Bill Gates guy think he is? He gives boatloads of his money away to improve education and he thinks he should have some say in how the money is spent? What a total jerk.
"The fact that it didn't really catch on as the answer to technology in education should tell us something about those who keep going back to this model for learning."
This comment is, quite frankly, complete bullshit. It's like saying, "It was raining, so I used an umbrella, but then I was swept away by the tsunami. So what good are umbrellas?" I particularly liked the sweeping (and meaningless) reference to "technology in education." What the hell does that mean?
It is not an opinion that Khan Academy works, it is a demonstrable fact. And even though there are surface similarities between what was presented on a PLATO screen and what KA looks like, they couldn't be more different.
PLATO IV was approximately 1,000 plasma panel terminals connected to the biggest, baddest, MFing CPU any of us had ever seen. But if you couldn't get a seat in front of one of those terminals, PLATO didn't exist for you. We estimated that the average "student contact hour" of took 200 hours of design, programming and pedagogical work.
KA is millions upon millions of home computers (all of which are more powerful than the PLATO IV CPU) connected via the net to a Django-driven website that is literally changing and improving on a daily basis -- changes that are driven by teacher requests and student experiences. KA students aren't watching badly-done, rear-projected slides and listening to poorly recorded audio coming from of a Rube Goldberg, random-access audio device, they are choosing from amongst over 2,200 videos that are amazingly effective and available 24/7. Although almost all of the course presentations are currently done by Salman, that's beginning to change as they get translations into other languages, and new course material on subjects that he is not an expert in.
So don't compare PLATO to KA. It's as wrong-headed as trying to compare KRONOS to Linux 2.6.32.33-rc1. The KA feedback loop -- from developers > students/teachers > developers > and back again -- is as tight as any open source project I've ever seen. PLATO IV was the loftiest of closed cathedrals, whereas Khan Academy is a bazaar that is growing exponentially right before our eyes.
(And, yes, I do know what the hell I'm talking about because I've lived through all of this stuff. 10 of my 38 years in computing have been associated with CAI / CBT / WBT, starting with PLATO IV in 1973.)
Yes... it was Ballmer who brought us... uhh..."the monkey boy dance"!!!
Good for him!
soylentnews.org Go there to enjoy the people!
This post is like 50% hyperlinks 50% text and 100% useless.
Plato was killed by the teachers Unions. Considering all the death threats these Unions have been handing out lately, I think I'll stay anonymous.
...because having something available (educational videos) is automatically going to motivate a child to learn. The inner-city thugs will trade in their weapons for computer terminals and the back-woods yee-haws will all take up book-learnin.' Give me a break. Make these types of systems available, and students who want to learn will utilize them, those that don't won't. Anyone who wants to learn can learn, and no one can make someone learn who is not raised to see the value of an education. And that's the issue no one wants to touch...CULTURE. Sure, it's easy for some to talk about personal responsibility when we're discussing health care, but no politician has the balls to say, "If there are other children taking the same classes with the same teachers at the same school that are succeeding, and your child is failing, take some personal responsibility. It's your child. Be a parent. Make sure they're not skipping class...make sure their completing their assignments and turning them in on time...make sure their studying for tests. If your child is doing everything that is required of them in school, and they don't have a learning disability, then lets see if it's a problem with the school.
"Oh, what sad times these are when passing ruffians can say 'ni' to helpless old ladies."
Teachers make crap money. Government workers make crap money.
Please define "crap money" because I don't think it means what you think it means. Do they make the millions some CEO's make? No. Do they make more then what their responsibilities are worth? Arguably, yes, way more. The other thing to remember is that there are a lot more Teachers and Government workers then there are CEO's.
It isn't your money .... You exchanged the money for your citizenship rights
No, that is not correct. I don't pay taxes in exchange for rights. I was born with inalienable rights and I, along with many others, constructed and now fund a government whose sole purpose is to protect those rights. The government is not separate from the people, it is made of the people, given power by the people, and it's whole purpose is to do the people's will. So any money the government has does not belong to it, it belongs to the people as a whole (rather than to the people individually). The idea that the money belongs to the government, is owed to the government came from politicians who would like to turn the government into something that it is not. This idea is false and should be derided, denied, and argued every time it is mentioned.
but on the other end the just read the book and makeing passing the class about the finale test is just as bad.
smarter students will get bored in a class where the professor just reads the book.
And basing it all on the leads to smart people how are bad at taking tests to do bad while people who can cram for a test but have no idea on who to use the material to get better grades.
This is why I read Slashdot. I learned about Khan Academy some time ago on Slashdot, and have been using it ever since. (Since then, spreading word to many people.) I've learned about more things by reading Slashdot than I could ever accurately enumerate. I seriously don't know why people deride the /. community.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
could it be that Gates was not so much talking about the technology but the ideas/concepts/design?
Gates needs to STFU. He doesn't know ANYTHING about education. I am so sick of Good King Bill and Good Queen Oprah, etc., etc., etc. FUCK KINGS AND QUEENS!!
Ah, what bullshit. You say, "Do they make more then what their responsibilities are worth? Arguably, yes, way more.," but that is simply untrue, if you compare their salaries and benefits to those of folks in the private sector doing the same thing. What's more, the CEOs always argue in regards to their pay, if you want the best, you need to pay the most. So why does that "pay for excellence" standard not apply to public sector workers
If 'the money' is owned by 'the people' then it is not YOUR money, which is my point. It is 'the people's' money. You do not have inalienable citizenship rights, try not paying your taxes and see how far that argument gets you.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Timmmeeeuh!
if you compare their salaries and benefits to those of folks in the private sector doing the same thing.
Citation please? I know you're going to be hard-pressed to find comparisons for jobs that don't exist in the private sector; Legislative 'runners', Congressmen, Teachers, Police Officers, Fire Fighters, Aides, etc. Not to mention the people who qualify for full pensions. There pretty much are no pensions in the private sector anymore, so anyone with one in the public sector is, by definition, overpaid.
The problem with government jobs is that government doesn't produce anything, doesn't sell anything and isn't even attempting to break even let alone turn a profit. Because of this, there is no real control on wages. There is no one looking at the bottom line and making the hard choices in terms of pay cuts, layoffs, etc. On the Federal level, there is the mentality that the government cannot run out of money, that there is nothing that the government can't afford to pay and it is that mentality that is destroying this country. I remember listening to some Congressmen say, when asked about the $50 billion in cash that was sent to Iraq and was lost and mismanaged, that "$50 billion dollars isn't a lot of money, so what are you worrying about?" He should of been shot and in another time, he probably would of been.
If 'the money' is owned by 'the people' then it is not YOUR money
Yes, it is no longer MY money but I still have a say in how it should be spent. Saying it's the government's money and it's none of my business how they spend it, is just wrong.
Let's face it - Gates was lucky. IBM let him sell his copy of DOS
Gates was selling microcomputer BASIC to the Fortune 500 as far back as July 1976.
FORTRAN and COBOL in 1977. In 1979 8080 BASIC takes an ICP Million Dollar Award - and PC software sales are now officially big business.
In the late seventies, CP/M was the standard OS for business applications. Microsoft's first hardware product was the Z-80 Softcard for the Apple II and the Apple III.
Gates promised to deliver a serviceable 16 bit CP/M clone for the 8086 in time for the scheduled launch of the new IBM - along with a full suite of programming languages for the new micro.
In exchange for a non-exclusive license, PC-DOS could be sold for a pinch-penny $50 retail list. These were the words IBM wanted to hear, and they weren't coming from Digital Research.
Uhm. There are all sorts of tools available now for building instruction and teaching. Am I the only one here with a Master's in Instructional Technology?
Plato was cool for it's time, but there are a lot of great options out there. We don't have to get stuck in the past.
Lots of books, articles, everything. He knows about decades of research. http://www.alfiekohn.org/index.php (Disclaimer: I am not Alfie Kohn.)
Legislative runners: gophers, secretaries, executive assistants. Score 1 for the private sector
Congressmen: Wall Street CEOs. Score 2
Teachers: Teachers. Score 3 to 0 for the private sector.
Police Officers: Private Security: Score 4 to 0.
Fire Fighters, okay, there isn't much like a fire fighter in the private sector. I wonder why?
Aides: didn't we cover this in 'runners?'
Anyway, I took a look on google. Wow is there a lot of propaganda out there. It's funny how many news outlets seem to be skewing the truth, and saying that public sector workers make more, yet, when you look on actual jobs site, it really depends on the job. If you are a microbiologist, take the government job. If you are an attorney, take the private sector job. And if you are high up in management, obviously, take the private sector job AFTER you work in government and get lots of contacts.
http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2009/01/26/government-salaries-vs-private-sector-salaries/
Government DOES produce things, like educated citizens, roads, extinguished fires, national parks, and other types of things known as 'externalities' that the free market simply fails to provide, because, outside of government taxes, there is no way to make everyone who benefits pay for said benefits.
Clinton's budget proves you wrong, we can cut wasteful government fat without cutting the meat. Mismanagement is one thing. Cutting teachers' salaries is another. Don't complain about the greedy public sector workers (full disclosure, I am one, and making considerably less than in the private sector, but with more security.) making more than you do. It's not our fault we held on to our unions while private sectors ditched theirs and let their bosses anally rape them for the last forty or fifty years. Go after the bosses, they are the ones who took your money, not government workers.
They are trying to misdirect you, to keep you from looking at the real source of the problem: them.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
PLATO was loved by teachers and students in my local school system in the late 90s. Then they moved onto COMPASS until someone had the idea, let's do it in the cloud... Apex and Odyssey were born. They tell me that these programs have contributed to their great successes as defined by the "No Child Left Behind" act.
Signature applied for, Patent Pending
He is also doomed to look like a fool, as it is supposedly his technical savvy that lead to market dominance by Microsoft.
Bill did study history. He studied Xerox and their inability to extract profit. And he probably cocked a snook at Adam Osborne. I expect better from a primordial UID.
This is classic motive substitution. Bill has never been about beauty or progress. He's all about the tsunami of monetization. Innovation never had much to do with their business model. That's why you can hardly find three paragraphs from the mouth of any Microsoft executive in which the word "innovation" doesn't appear. Innovation is Microsoft's FTC shibboleth.
In information technology, innovation is more generally a code word for "those who won deserved to win". Also known as "history is written by the victor" or its corollary "those who study history are doomed to rewrite it".
The ugly truth is that when you an exponential technology curve so uniform over thirty doubling cycles that a Tour rider would select a fixed gear bicycle for weight reduction, technological innovation is not what separates the fit from the fallout. What separates the fit from the fallout is expertise in non-linear business methods and continuous disruption. Anyone who studies the naked Napalm children of the PC revolution with a gun-steel gaze will recognize Microsoft for expertise and innovation in both of these areas.
Telling me that PLATO is a viable present day reference is like discovering that some ancient civilization had a system for loaning out graven stone tablets exactly like a modern day library right down to the papyrus library card.
Here's where innovation enters the ancient picture. Some prescient dude observes "if only we carved the same symbols onto gold leaf, the whole concept would take the demographic leap".
Memory Prices (1957-2010)
The oldest memory chip I recall is the 2102, which cost $50/kB back in 1975. I learned how to fat finger on a board with 8 of these chips. We're presently in the vicinity of $10/GB. Mesopotamian libraries with books hammered out of gold leaf is not much of a mental stretch for me.
But somehow if I skipped the introductory chapter on Mesopotamia 101, I'd be doomed to repeat some classic mistake != coming to market with a technology pounded out of gold leaf.
Little known fact: Jacques Cousteau spent the majority of his career in secret pursuit of an overdue gold-leaf copy of a Mesopotamian page turner entitled "Roots". According to legend, the author complained bitterly over it being "passed around".
According to a 1981 dated Users Guide document.
http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/cdc/plato/97405900C_PLATO_Users_Guide_Apr81.pdf
``AIDS is an on-line reference manual for authors and instructors, which contains definitions and explanations of most of the PLATO system features.'' [4-5]
Lets take the Police Officer case: Police (patrol) officers make ~54k a year. I don't know any Security Guards that are making that. And those Security Guards don't get retirement after 20 YEARS and don't have a pension either! The high cost of public officials + pension + the early retirement age is killing us. What other sector can you retire at age 40 with pension? Give us a break!
Citation please?
5 seconds of googling later...
I'm a UX researcher at a university -- that's right, one of those government workers who don't produce anything and blow taxpayer dollars. I make a decent living, but it's still 20% less than I'd make in the private sector. I stay because 1) the benefits are decent (not great compared to many companies, but better than if I were consulting full time and working for myself); and 2) I like that my work is helping students learn instead of convincing shoppers to buy more.
I work with dozens of people not unlike myself -- people who can make a lot more and choose not to in order to (hopefully) make the world a better place.
As a conservative, I realize that it's easy to paint government workers with one brush; certainly I'm not impressed with most teachers, cops, or politicians -- hell, even some of my coworkers should be shown the door. But without many of us willing to work for less than we're worth, things would crumble.
You don't know any security guards that make that? Maybe that's because "security guard" is not the private sector equivalent: "bodyguard" is a better analogy, as the levels of danger are more equivalent. Most professional bodyguards make more than $54k per year, and they do have better pensions. Police can retire from the force after a given number of years, but still face a penalty for early retirement before the age of 65, just like anyone else. Do you really think $54k is a lot of money? That's barely middle class. Shouldn't police officers be able to afford a home and college for their kids?
The rich want us to fight each other to the death over the scraps they cast off, and you seem only too happy to side with them. Stop looking greedily at the meager compensation public sector workers make, if you want to blame someone, blame the ultra-wealthy ruling elites. They stole your pay and pension, and now they want you to blame someone who still has theirs. Well, if you want what the public sector has, stand up to the greedy bosses and UNIONIZE!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
What's all this self-paced education crap? Who needs to be educated in the USA anymore? Can't we just buy education from overseas?
Take this confangle-ment to them far-away places like China, Japan, or Korea where they actually give a damn about people who can add, subtract or hell even understand that stupid lower-case x or dot is doing between two numbers.
I've gotta go watch me a game of FOOTBALL!
I don't really understand the point the poster is trying to make here. The technology Kahn uses is good enough, but it's nothing special. It's exceedingly simple really, and the capability to do it has been around for many years, as has youtube for sharing it. Although the technology available to Kahn's is superior in one critical way to PLATO - it is hugely more accessible - that's not the main reason for his popularity.
The reason for Khan's success is that he is a good teacher, he's a smart guy that knows a lot about a broad range of subjects and he has made putting these lessons on the internet his full time job. This post sounds to me like saying the Beatles were a bunch of hacks because people were putting songs on wax cylinders 70 years before. It's not about the medium, it's about the content, and smart as PLATO's designers were, I highly doubt they were as good at teaching as Kahn is.
I understand a lot of people want to dump on Bill Gates here. But even if you don't like his teaching style, it's hard not to respect Salman Kahn. If you don't like his lessons, don't watch them. But I think it's obvious that he has helped a lot of people learn some pretty challenging material.
Pundits of science and technology intransigence are our political, religious, and business leaders, obviously.
There are so fracken many "Open" content producers for education (K...PhD) that I won't go copy a URLink for the Luddites of our culture. USA Public Education could bound past the historical and present USA have-&-have-not "separate-but-equal" BS education system with little effort and reasonable cost. Then our economy would not have the vast supply of expendable have-not folks to flip-burgers, deal-drugs, and populate-prisons.
MIT Open Course Ware is just one of many globally.
"OpenStudy" is another example... there are hundred more in the USA, globally "Hell if I know" there is so dang many of'em.
Gates like most other CEOs and politicians are innovation and tecno-phobes, the religious clowns want a simpletons world of hell-on-earth Armageddon.
The USA cannot grow-up, because there is a disgraceful national policy of promulgating illiteracy as the best solution to poor white-collar leadership bossman-decisions.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Police are like waitresses. Most of the money they make isn't in the actual salary.
The difference? Restaurants don't have a bribe jar.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Plato, you're no Kahn.
I used Plato back in the day. It is probably impossible to describe just how awful it is when you take a vector supercomputer designed for batch processing and tie it to a bunch of expensive (but slow!) graphics terminals.
Plato was proof, if any was needed, that we were not ready.
That is why I wrote: http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html ... So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the fewest people get hurt in the process."
"Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand. Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
You're right that Bill doesn't yet seem to understand or address the root of the problem, but the real problem is coming from parents that don't care.
Their children are the most in danger of getting a poor education. They are also the children most likely to become involved with crime, get pregnant, do drugs and generally have a poor shot at getting ahead in life.
If you want to fix the system, you need to change the parents or the children's environment, ie food, shelter and guidance.
IMHO it's too late for unions to recreate private niche welfare states within big companies or big government agencies moving to full automation and outsourcing/offshoring, even as unions could still make a global difference, as I discuss here:
http://www.beyondajoblessrecovery.org/2009/11/16/can-unions-and-strikes-still-make-a-difference/
It's probably now or never for the unions to make on last big push before they are just washed away by all these changes related to AI, robotics, better design, voluntary social networks, the accumulation of infrastructure, and so on...
IMHO, as long as we have a highly capitalistic system, everyone should get social security of US $2K a month (plus health care) from birth as a basic income, which would take the GDP growth from the mid 1990s, and the rest of the GDP was enough to motivate some people to work for more back then.
But there are five interwoven economies and we need to shift the balance between them as to the subsistence economy, the gift economy, the planned economy, the exchange economy, and the theft/corruption economy.
See also:
http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
When I was an undergrad, we had a few PLATO terminals in the computer lab. (To calibrate for age here, about six months before I turned 30, a couple of other guys had big birthday bashes, but unlike Bill and Steve, I hadn't yet made my first billion dollars...)
PLATO was not only the world's coolest Star Trek game terminal, it was also the home of Notesfiles, a system that influenced Netnews (=>Usenet) and also Lotus Notes. It took Bill a few years to catch on to how this Internetworking stuff might be important, but he would have been aware of it.
But long before PLATO, when I was in elementary school, we had programmed instruction materials, running on a medium called Dead Trees. Some of it was flashcard-based, most of it was workbooks with a lot of "for more on this topic, skip to page 43".
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Empire anyone?
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
Kahn courses are pretty web 2.o (god I gate that term) in any case, the real befit comes from wide spread internet connectivity. Now the only added cost to add 1,000 more students, or 10,000, or 100,000 is a fraction of server load.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Norris ...
"William Charles Norris (July 14, 1911 near Red Cloud, Nebraska -- August 21, 2006) was the pioneering CEO of Control Data Corporation, at one time one of the most powerful and respected computer companies in the world. He is famous for taking on IBM in a head-on fight and winning, as well as being a social activist who used Control Data's expansion in the late 1960s to bring jobs and training to inner-cities and disadvantaged communities.
Another CDC project that Norris championed was the PLATO system, an online teaching and instruction system developed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The university developed most of the system on a CDC-1604 machine driving graphics terminals of their own design. In 1974 they reached an agreement with CDC to allow CDC to sell PLATO in exchange for free machines on which to run it. PLATO was released in 1975, but saw almost no use due to its high costs and complex maintenance. In the end PLATO did see some use as an employee training tool in large companies, but was never a success in the original education market."
I corresponded with him for a time around 1991. He sent me a copy of his biography (by James C. Worthy):
http://www.amazon.com/William-C-Norris-Portrait-Maverick/dp/0887300871
He also sent me copies of his essays for CDC publications. I wanted to make them available in OC'd digital form but never quite got approval for that. Here are several of them put up by others though:
http://www.cbi.umn.edu/hostedpublications/NorrisOnTechnology/index.html
A relevant one from there (on education):
http://www.cbi.umn.edu/hostedpublications/NorrisOnTechnology/Norris_2-Education.pdf
"Another problem is pricing. The present method of financing most formal education with tax dollars, contributions, and tuition at lower than cost inhibits improvements in quality, productivity, and availability. It also restricts options that could otherwise be available and maintains the inequality in educational opportunity that results from uneven district-to-district financial resources."
Although I go beyond that here: :-)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html
I met my wife around then so things dropped off, but I had hoped maybe I could have been an intern for free with his foundation to help with advanced manufacturing (or something) or somehow worked with him and learned from him.
William C. Norris was an amazing person. He really is a great role model in many ways, and I'm glad I had the chance to read his biography and correspond with him. I sent him a small donation back then (just a struggling grad student at the time) and he said he used it to take a disadvantaged person to lunch. What a guy! :-)
http://reddwarf.wikia.com/wiki/Ace_Rimmer
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
"The problem with CEO jobs is that corporate governance doesn't produce anything, doesn't sell anything and isn't even attempting to break even let alone turn a profit. Because of this, there is no real control on wages."
There, fixed that for you. :-)
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
what's more, focus on www.knitting-machinery.com
for School of Education quacks and bureaucrats of all levels who have been pushing fashionable theories about "children, teenagers, sociology, social psychology, pedagogy, performance/theater, linguistics, or any other field necessary to comprehend what a teacher is" for the last 50 years -- managing to achieve only functional illiteracy and innumeracy.
_Any_ traditional education education system that kept away from these pedagogic theories and "discoveries" has better results. Somehow "Singapore Math", which is basically 50 year old classic European programs, is an effective innovation!
And, by the way, this has nothing to do with the poor. In Eastern Europe math and physics have been taught at a fraction of the US price, in crap-hole buildings and neighborhoods, with much better results. The secret is called "discipline in the classroom", and removal of those who refuse to observe it to special schools where they do not interfere with others' learning. And -- surprise -- no teachers' unions and other political organizations to keep well-wishing incompetents employed as teachers.
"Most of the "decent" school districts are turning out plenty of intelligent graduates (myself and I'm sure you are included)."
That depends on what you mean by "intelligent" and "decent" as well as whether intelligence by itself, apart from wisdom, virtue, compassion, self-directedness, cooperativeness, spirituality, and so on makes for a joyful, secure, meaningful, involved life?
A lot of this has to do with being "learner-centered" and focused on creating healthy communities.
For example, we lived for a while in a "top 10" school district (Chappaqua) but it had had a high teen suicide rate, and kids who did not want to go onto college were being tracked there even if they had other aspirations (like my wife's dental hygienist who said the school system essentially forced her to go to college when what she wanted to be was a dental hygienist). Is that a "success" when you force all kids, regardless of interest, to go to college and take on college debt? Is that a "success" when a lot of kids are killing themselves, developing eating disorders, displaying a lot of aggression, are on psychoactive drugs to manage what are labeled behavior problems, and so on? It was one of the least healthy communities we have lived in, even with the most money, and with the Clintons moving in after us (the place went downhill faster then people said).
The fact is, if you came through a typical schooling process, even private school, you were in some sense intellectually and emotionally mutilated, even to the point of being indoctrinated to see that type of mutilation as a good thing. See:
http://www.thewaronkids.com/
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
As with any kind of child abuse, especially when done systematically and with claims of being helpful, such as with female genital mutilation (FGM), it may take years, or maybe never, for a mutilated individual to accept what happened in Prussian schools and how morally wrong it was.
As Gatto says:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue6.htm
"Old-fashioned dumbness used to be simple ignorance; now it is transformed from ignorance into permanent mathematical categories of relative stupidity like "gifted and talented," "mainstream," "special ed." Categories in which learning is rationed for the good of a system of order. Dumb people are no longer merely ignorant. Now they are indoctrinated, their minds conditioned with substantial doses of commercially prepared disinformation dispensed for tranquilizing purposes.
Jacques Ellul, whose book Propaganda is a reflection on the phenomenon, warned us that prosperous children are more susceptible than others to the effects of schooling because they are promised more lifelong comfort and security for yielding wholly:
"Critical judgment disappears altogether, for in no way can there ever be collective critical judgment....The individual can no longer judge for himself because he inescapably relates his thoughts to the entire complex of values and prejudices established by propaganda. With regard to political situations, he is given ready-made value judgments invested with the power of the truth by...the word of experts."
The new dumbness is particularly deadly to middle- and upper-middle-class kids already made shallow by multiple pressures to conform imposed by the outside world on their usually lightly rooted parents. When they come of age, they are certain they must know something because their degrees and licenses say they do. They remain so convinced until an unexpectedly brutal divorce, a corporate downsizing in midlife, or panic attacks of meaninglessness upset the precarious balance of their incomplete humanity, their stillborn adult lives. Alan Bullock, the English historian, said Evil was a state of i
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Interesting stuff. "Private niche welfare state" nearly threw me, but in the article (you wrote? Nice.) you contrast that with the more desirable actual State welfare state.
IMHO, economic insecurity and economic flexibility and innovation are mutually exclusive. A country can not be agile enough to stay competitive unless its citizens are free to let go of old outmoded forms of work, and they can't do that unless they feel economically secure. Socialism does more to foster real competitiveness than capitalism does.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Good points, and thanks for the kid words about the article.
I feel lack of universal health coverage, for example, is one thing holding back more entrepreneurship in the USA. I've known several people who said they can not change jobs or try something different over health insurance worries.
But, that is in some sense by design; from "Conceptual Guerilla": ,,,"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/16
"When you cut right through it, right-wing ideology is just âoedime-store economicsâ â" intended to dress their ideology up and make it look respectable. You don't really need to know much about economics to understand it. They certainly donâ(TM)t. It all gets down to two simple words.
"Cheap labor" Thatâ(TM)s their whole philosophy in a nutshell -- which gives you a short and pithy "catch phrase" that describes them perfectly. You've heard of "big-government liberals". Well they're "cheap-labor conservatives"
Once you understand the general concept, you will frequently find yourself in debate over specific issues, like healthcare, social security privatization, public school vouchers, the "war on drugs" and of course the war in Iraq. What better way to put your conservative opponent on the defensive than by exposing the true motivation for his position -- "cheap labor". Can you really find the "cheap labo"â angle in every conservative policy initiative, and every conservative position on any particular issue?
Yes, you can. Here is a catalogue of some of the major issues on the national agenda. In every single one of them, the conservative position advances the cause of "cheap labor". I defy any conservative reading this to show me one single conservative position, belief, principle or policy that has any tendency to boost the earning power of labor.
Of course, the ultimate in "cheap labor" is "no labor" -- replacing labor by a machine, a computer, better design, cheap energy, or volunteers, or something else. Technology is making that all possible, and even easier. For example, cloud computing makes it easier to get rid of system administrators.
So, in general, the bargaining power of most labor is eroding, because productivity is rising but demand is limited (Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and Reduce, Reuse, Recycle)..
I'm not saying the bargaining power of all labor is eroding, just most labor. Some people are still in demand, generally those with certain combinations of rarer skills combined with social connections. But all that contributes to an increasing rich/poor divide. More and more people are finding that a highly automated industrial system just does not need them. And that is bad news in the absence of some sort of social safety net, or better, some sort of social security as a human right as a citizen.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Freedoms
You used the word "competitive", but the fact is, cooperation is more what we need.
http://www.share-international.org/archives/cooperation/co_nocontest.htm
Why should US citizens have to be "competitive" with wage slavery or full automation because of an income-through-jobs link?
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
People saw this was going to happen even in the 1960s, but sadly the Democrats ended up pushing for full employment rather than social equity as a right to access the fruits of the industrial commons:
And the Republicans became the party of technological progress in some ways (but co
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Read the "cheap labor conservative" article when it first came out. Yes, we need more cooperation, and 'competition' of the form where at least one entity must lose for another to win, is a bad way to run an economy overall. I was using the term to speak of 'global competitiveness,' as in, how well our country can do in relation to other countries, not just in GDP but quality of life. The competition being, in my mind, who can do the most for their citizens.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The Genesis of Postscript (1981)
By Jim Bowery
Version 20010406
Copyright 2001
The author grants the right to copy, without modification.
The Challenge
From 2001 through 2007 I offered, with no takers, $500 to the first person who could document the existence of a Xerox PARC communication concerning post-fix notation for page description languages prior to my visit to that facility in November 1981 in my capacity as Manager of Interactive Architectures for Viewdata Corporation of America, the videotex joint venture between AT&T and Knight-Ridder News. Communiques regarding "JaM" were disqualified unless they specifically use the term "page description language", "typesetting language" or some equivalent phrase, and are appropriately dated.
The History
What was the true genesis of the Postscript?
Here’s a perspective out of left field:
It started with the first scientific pocket calculator ever produced -- the Hewlett-Packard 35 -- and its reverse polish "postfix" notation.
I saw an HP-35 advertised in Scientific American during my senior year in high school, in 1972, and thought:
"I want one."
That's why I worked all summer with "Shorty" the ex-convict, driving garbage trucks with 18 gears I was never properly trained to use and drinking beers so as to Lorenz-contract the days that were punctuated with hot steaming maggots down my neck as bemused debs reclined in their back yards nurturing their future basal cell carcinomas. When I started at the University of Iowa, I forked over my saved up $495 to Hewlett-Packard and instead of a slide-rule on my belt, I had this neat little black pouch that could do it all while flashing tiny red light-emitting-diode numbers -- reverse polish operation. I found only one other person on campus who had one -- a chemistry professor.
Well, OK, I lied.
What really happened was that while I was working as a garbage man to earn enough money for my HP-35, many mornings at 6AM they would tell me they didn't need me that day, which is when I would head over to Drake University and wait for my brother to get out of class at noon. That was almost 6 hours away, and I needed some way to pass the time. After poking around a bit on campus, I found this little old 2 story house that had a "Mathematics Department" sign. Inside, off to the left, was a long room. In that room was a desk-top Hewlett-Packard calculator with a flat-bed pen plotter hooked to it. It had more buttons than you could shake a stick at and this little magnetic card you could insert to record the buttons you were pressing, which included comparison and conditional branch buttons. You could program it to not only do calculations, but to move the pen around on the plotter bed that held the paper down with static. It was really cool. I could finally use a lot of that worthless junk about polynomials and stuff I had learned in high school and draw lots of neat op-art patterns with a pseudo-3D look to them.
That desk calculator (I don't recall the model number), of course, also used reverse polish notation -- postfix -- to drive its plotter.
By the time I got my HP-35 that fall, postfix operations were second nature to me. When the HP-35 fell in price by a factor of two later that year, it taught me my first lesson of consumerism in the early stages of Moore's Shockwave, b
Seastead this.
Given that each individual does not have full access to every one else's experiences, we each come away with a portion of history. For example, I did not work at Viewdata, so could not comment on that portion.
However, I did use PLATO from 1973 on CERL and then worked at Control Data on PLATO from 1976 to 1980 and will support Jim's commentary.
In 1980 after I had left Control Data, I was asked to return to manage the MicroTUTOR group. Yes, I could only return at the same salary I had left, which was about what a secretary was making, but now to have the responsibility to manage a project and staff. (To quote the genius in "Princess Bride", "Inconceivable!")
A year or two later I worked at a consulting company and developed a contract with CDC to implement the MicroTUTOR interpreter. It was a fun development project. It would have allowed TUTOR programs (apps) to run on just about any platform. After we turned the code and documentation over, we never heard back, never saw the product make it to market. (I don't know what all happened up in Minnesota on it.)
It was sad for me to see the wonder of PLATO as developed by the University of Illinois CERL team become flotsam among the turbulent seas of politics of various factions at CDC.
Regardless those mis-steps, the development of PLATO led to a mass of individuals who experienced computers in a personal, networked way who streamed out into the world in various creative positions, such as Jim, like David Woolley, Ray Ozzie, and a multitude of friends who became core creative people at Apple, HP, Google, and many, many places. PLATO still lives in the tools we use today, in the user interface experience, in the teaching systems, in the networking tools, and so many other places.
It does frustrate us that this history is little known and little appreciated. People developing computer-based education and training systems today assume they are the first. Some marketer or executive at {insert-any-large-company-such-as-IBM-Microsoft-etc} pushes the concept that they invented it and it becomes *history*. (WAS the IBM PC the real first personal computer? I don't think so... Did IBM invent the plasma panel? I don't think so... Don Bitzer's team did it for PLATO.)
Go try out PLATO on cyber1.org.