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."

Comments

Obligatory Link

[oldfogie]

For those who really care -- Plato (emulated) is still online.

Cyber1

Re:The truth

[Anonymous Coward]

No, The Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan.

Re:Slef-paced education is not a panacea

[keytoe]

When smarter students becomes bored, they too become frustrated and learn ways to play the courseware. That rapidly supplants learning the material.

So, the smarter student becoming bored due to learning the material rapidly which causes them to no longer learn the material?

When I was in 3rd grade, my teacher thought I was slow because I wasn't doing the material provided. It was recommended I undergo psychiatric testing. Testing concluded that I was bored out of my skull and just wasn't interested in doing 5 pages worth of division problems every night after grasping the concept after a day.

The next year, my parents put me in a small private school that provided self-paced learning. It was the single best academic experience of my life, and I gobbled up the curriculum through the 7th grade level - in all subjects. At no point did I ever become bored with the material as it was always new and interesting to me.

Regrettably, my parents couldn't afford to keep that up, so it was back to public schools for 5th grade. My parents tried to get me into the accelerated classes, but my teacher was convinced I should instead be in with the remedial. He insisted I be IQ tested. I did much better than he expected and got in.

I took honors classes my first year in high school, then decided to 'take it easy' my sophomore year with regular courses. I did abysmally for a semester and ended up having to do summer school to make up for a failed term of history. I immediately recognized the pattern and switched back to honors programs at the semester.

From this experience I learned a few things:

1. - If I'm not challenged, my interest drops like a stone.
2. - Bored smart students are indistinguishable from remedial students to a teacher with 30+ students in the class.
3. - Modern public schools are doing nothing to encourage bright young minds.
4. - And more philosophically, that the world is full of shitty, mundane things you just have to do even if they're pointless and inane. Public school is actually really good at teaching this, but in this aspect I was a terrible student.