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Education Chief Should Know About PLATO and the History of Online CS Education

Posted by samzenpus on from the back-in-the-day dept.

theodp writes Writing in Vanity Fair, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan marvels that his kids can learn to code online at their own pace thanks to "free" lessons from Khan Academy, which Duncan credits for "changing the way my kids learn" (Duncan calls out his kids' grade school for not offering coding). The 50-year-old Duncan, who complained last December that he "didn't have the opportunity to learn computer skills" while growing up attending the Univ. of Chicago Lab Schools and Yale, may be surprised to learn that the University of Illinois was teaching kids how to program online in the '70s with its PLATO system, and it didn't look all that different from what Khan Academy came up with for his kids 40 years later (Roger Ebert remarked in his 2011 TED Talk that seeing Khan Academy gave him a flashback to the PLATO system he reported on in the '60s). So, does it matter if the nation's education chief — who presides over a budget that includes $69 billion in discretionary spending — is clueless about The Hidden History of Ed-Tech? Some think so. "We can't move forward," Hack Education's Audrey Watters writes, "til we reconcile where we've been before." So, if Duncan doesn't want to shell out $200 to read a 40-year-old academic paper on the subject (that's a different problem!) to bring himself up to speed, he presumably can check out the free offerings at Ed.gov. A 1975 paper on Interactive Systems for Education, for instance, notes that 650 students were learning programming on PLATO during the Spring '75 semester, not bad considering that Khan Academy is boasting that it "helped over 2000 girls learn to code" in 2014 (after luring their teachers with funding from a $1,000,000 Google Award). Even young techies might be impressed by the extent of PLATO's circa-1975 online CS offerings, from lessons on data structures and numerical analysis to compilers, including BASIC, PL/I, SNOBOL, APL, and even good-old COBOL.

25 of 134 comments (clear)

  1. Not news by operagost · · Score: 4, Interesting

    A presidential appointee who is ignorant and unqualified? Horrors!

    --

    Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
    1. Re:Not news by sycodon · · Score: 4, Informative

      The Plato system was not a niche system. It was a complete automated learning system with content in all areas, reading , writing ,math, history. They were the first to have the curriculum adapt to the students progress and allow, theoretically at least, a student to follow a course of study independently.

      They did not close their doors until 2006.

      Anyone involved in the educational software market knew and respected Plato.

      --
      When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
    2. Re:Not news by nabsltd · · Score: 2, Informative

      He just doesn't know about some niche system from 40 years ago.

      PLATO was many things, but not "niche".

      I'm the same age as the SecEd, didn't go to "prestige" schools like he did, and still had access to systems running PLATO.

    3. Re:Not news by rnturn · · Score: 5, Informative

      I think the point of the story is that Duncan has never shown any curiosity once he got out of college. His degree is in Sociology and not Education so I think there are some valid questions as to his qualifications. I think it's rather telling that he doesn't even know what's been done in the past in the field in which he's employed. You have to wonder just that the heck he does all day. He's never done anything in education other than be an administrator. And he's never been much good at doing that. Chicago's pubic schools were a mess when he started running them and they were a mess when he left. Actual educators can't stand the guy.

      BTW, PLATO was hardly a "niche" system and it was certainly never considered "irrelevant" by anyone who knows what the heck they're talking about. I first encountered it while on a two week high school trip (JETS) to UofI but didn't have as much time to access it as I would have liked. There were PLATO terminals in many colleges back in the '70s; I know there was at least a couple of them where I did my undergraduate work. The PLATO terminals were heavily used and getting time on them required signing up for a time slot well in advance. It's may be "cool" nowadays to consider the PLATO system "niche" but people need to remember that the world of computing and computer-aided education didn't begin with the Internet. PLATO was in use while Duncan was going to college at Harvard; maybe they just didn't have a terminal in the Sociology Department.

      --
      CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
    4. Re:Not news by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I think the point of the story is that Duncan has never shown any curiosity once he got out of college.

      This is true for a vast majority of people who graduated from high school and/or college, who see learning as the end of a long journey and not the beginning of a neverending journey. The education system tells them to stop learning, so they stopped learning and go through life without questioning the world around them. Some are even proud of being stupid or ignorant.

    5. Re:Not news by DerekLyons · · Score: 4, Interesting

      That's what the summary want you to believe. However, it's the summary that ignorant - because the submitter cannot seem to grasp that back in the 70's it was quite possible for kids in one place to have the opportunity and kids in another to not have that opportunity.

      I really shouldn't have to explain this, but as bias has already replaced facts in the summary and your reply, I guess I have to.

      Back then (remember, we're talking the 1970's), not everyone (even at 'elite' schools) had the opportunity to interact with a computers - especially if you weren't in a computer or science field. For kids at home? Home computers were very unusual. Home computers with a video screen and a modem and acess to a mainframe? Don't make me laugh. It's true in the latter half of the 70's that home computers began to be available and affordable, but they simply weren't that widespread. Radio Shack was selling the TRS-80 and it's derivatives... at the stunning rate of 10,000 a year. Commodore PET's sold at a similar rate, as did the Apple II (And the US had a population of 225 million - you do the math.) Nor did we have the public internet or the WWW.

      Now of course, we're going to have some other old farts pipe up and explain that *they* had access to this stuff back then - and then indulge in the logical fallacy of generalizing from their experience. (To those who make the mistake of claiming I'm doing the same - go back and look at those sales numbers in the previous paragraph. And digging around, I find similiar sales numbers for mini-computers in the same era.) They're wrong six ways from Sunday, computers simply weren't part of the everyday life of most people and almost all kids back in the 1970's. In 1978, my dad helped a local hospital install their first ever computerized patient data system.* The year I graduated high school (1981), it's was (local) newsworthy that the local stores of a major national chain were installing a computerized POS system. (The guy they moved into town to manage them was our neighbor.) They weren't even networked - tapes were shipped back and forth and he had to drive around town installing the tapes and collecting the ones with sales data to be shipped back to Headquarters. (I didn't even see my first punch card until my sophomore year in high school - and it was from Ma Bell.)

      That is the reality of computers in the late 1970's and very early 1980's. They were just barely beginning to move out of academia and the big corporations. Individual (home/turnkey) computers were available, but were pretty rare. Networks of computers practically unheard of. In the year Secretary Duncan would have graduated high school (1982), we were indeed on the cusp of a great revolution - but it hadn't happened yet. It would be almost another decade before home computers (and thus the chance for kids to interact with them) became nearly ubiquitous. And even so, as a computer salesman in '91 and '92 I still had to explain to people what computers were and why it was a good idea to have one, especially if they had kids.

      So, being a year older than Secretary Duncan, I don't find it all surprising he didn't have the chance to learn to code when he was a kid. I did, but I was a very inquisitive geek, he doesn't appear to have been. Nor do I find it surprising that he doesn't know about a semi-obscure academic experiment that happened when he was a kid. (And that seems to have actually trained only a couple of thousand kids across a decade and a half.) Nor does it actually matter much that he didn't, because the reality is the opportunity was very rare when he was a kid.

      *Which I always thought odd, because he was a printer with pretty much no experience with computers. It wasn't for many years that I found out that the hospital had hired him to help adapt their existing paper flow to the computer flow. (Back then, it frequently was printers who designed forms and often helped design the data flow - because the physical con

    6. Re:Not news by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      PLATO was pretty wide-spread in the late 70's and early 80's. It's been largely forgotten, but that doesn't make it any less important. It would be like saying Xerox Park was irrelevant because not many people used it.

      Speaking as someone who actually used PLATO (I think I was around 12 at the time), I learned the basics of Fortran, Pascal, APL, and COBOL. Do I use any of those today? No. Was it valuable learning how different programming languages approach the same problems? Yes.

      Reinventing the wheel is a waste of time and money, and it's entirely possible that PLATO (a multi-user, nationwide network of e-learning systems) might actually have solved some of the problems facing e-learning today.

      So not knowing anything about it is definitely a mark against Arne Duncan, although not necessarily a huge strike. Now, if no one in the e-learning section of his department knows about it, that's a major fail.

    7. Re:Not news by Archangel+Michael · · Score: 2

      Having run several labs with PLATO in classrooms across our district, it is no surprise that they closed their doors in 2006. They pretty much priced themselves out of the market for schools that didn't have discretionary budgets of $40K in licensing. While it might seem reasonable in a world flush with money, I can assure you that there was no way could spend half a million dollars to get every school a lab.

      We stopped using it when XP came out simply because it was too expensive to upgrade from the crappy version that ran on Win98 but wouldn't run on XP. It was great when we had a grant that funded it, but grants run dry, and normal school budgets suck.

      --
      Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
    8. Re:Not news by Archangel+Michael · · Score: 2

      It wasn't niche, it was expensive. Only schools I ever saw it at, had grants that paid for it.

      --
      Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
    9. Re:Not news by Comrade+Ogilvy · · Score: 2

      I remember an editorial in the The Economist in praise of the admittedly tawdry British practice of campaign donors getting conferred titles by grace of the PM. The way they put it is that most big time donors surely expect something for their efforts, and better a not very meaningful title than a valuable ambassadorship or, far worse, an actual voice on policy. When they put it that way, I almost wish the US would start dishing out knighthoods.

    10. Re:Not news by billstewart · · Score: 2

      Candidate Obama gave great, inspiring speeches, but wasn't that good at real-time conversation. (President Obama not so much.) Dubya Bush always looked like a deer in the headlights, amazed that he was getting away with what he said and hoping nobody would ask questions about it.

      But the guy who was really good? Bill Clinton. He was always on, always quick thinking, always had a good comeback for anything, lots of fun to listen to. Sure, he was lying through his teeth half the time, but he knew which half it was, and he did it with a smile that said that he knew that you knew he was lying, and that he'd make the game worth playing, and he usually did.

      --

      Bill Stewart
      New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
  2. I concur! People should study Plato by s.petry · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Studying Plato's "The Republic" will give people insight into politicians, their shitty actions, their ability to bullshit people, and give them some tools to see through the rhetoric and be more impacting to their Government. I have been saying for decades that we need to get these classes back into schools and teach rhetoric and logic to a much younger age instead of restricting this to very few people at a college level.

    Oh wait, this is PLATO which has nothing to do with political thought.. Yes, lets continue to neglect educating people about those dangerous bits of knowledge and continue pushing the industrial education system. Nothing new here.

    --

    -The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.

  3. Not enough links in summary! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    Almost half the summary text is not linking to anything, why does nobody check these things?

  4. I'm not sure it's relevant. by darkwing_bmf · · Score: 2, Interesting

    In the 60s and 70s, home PCs were not common, the Internet was a research project and long distance phone calls were expensive.

    1. Re:I'm not sure it's relevant. by darkwing_bmf · · Score: 2

      I think your boss has the right of it. I loved programming ever since I had my first taste of it in 4th grade. And I had parents that had the means and will to a) care about my education and b) buy a computer for me when I was in 5th grade. Not everyone is as lucky as I was.

      http://techland.time.com/2012/...

  5. warning: nanny-state comment by cellocgw · · Score: 2

    Seems to me that kids who want to learn to hack around with a computer can quite well do so on their own, thank you. No need for some set of lessons, be they gov't-approved or not.

    I mean, really: at the very worst, 10 minutes with a search engine, the term " introduction and tutorial for $LANGUAGE" or Stackoverflow should get anyone capable of comprehending what programming is in the first place off and running.

    --
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  6. Department of Education by TheSync · · Score: 2

    Perhaps the federal Department of Education is just a complete boondoggle?

    Have schools really benefitted from this department, which was only formed in 1980? Has the quality of education gone up since then? Have the costs come down?

  7. Arne Duncan is a hack by jsepeta · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Arne Duncan's claim to fame is outsourcing Chicago schools to private for-profit corporations, undercutting the public school system. He's a world-class jerk and it's shameful that he's in charge of America's education policy. Shameful.

    --
    Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
  8. I learned to program on PLATO by mabu · · Score: 3, Informative

    I learned to program on PLATO. It was an AMAZING system. In addition to supporting a variety of development environments, their system used a proprietary language called TUTOR. A good bit of networking technology today is derivative of this amazing system. I wasn't rich, although I noted a lot of kids who had access to PLATO tended to be children of CEOs and such. My parents worked at a college that had a grant to have the terminals available. The games on the system were also amazing.

    As a programmer, PLATO was a great example of the "cloud"-type systems that will eventually become standard.. what Google is doing and Adobe is now proposing was done in the 70s at Plato, with centrally-hosted apps that routinely are updated automatically. As developers we could put in requests for program features and see them reflected in newer versions of the API. 512x512 resolution, touch sensitive screens, multi-player, real-time games between people all over the world..... in the 70s.

    By the way, the original PLATO system has been ported and is running over TCP/IP. If you're willing to donate to the project, they have been known to grant access to people wanting to experience what it was like. See: http://www.cyber1.org/

    By the way if anyone has the archive of the PLATO game 0drygulch.. PLEASE contact them... we've been dying to find that code and put it online.

    1. Re:I learned to program on PLATO by drinkypoo · · Score: 2

      As a programmer, PLATO was a great example of the "cloud"-type systems that will eventually become standard.. what Google is doing and Adobe is now proposing was done in the 70s at Plato, with centrally-hosted apps that routinely are updated automatically. As developers we could put in requests for program features and see them reflected in newer versions of the API. 512x512 resolution, touch sensitive screens, multi-player, real-time games between people all over the world..... in the 70s.

      This describes any website with AJAX and dynamic updates, now. It's not something coming (again) in the future, it's here at the moment.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  9. Education Shouldn’t Be Such Be Mess by DumbSwede · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I went to the University of Illinois in the 80’s, I’d heard of Plato, but didn’t get to experience it. That said I had gone to a community college my first two years (Blackhawk College in Moline) and remember a multimedia learning experience involved slides, audio, and text input that really seemed to accelerate my learning on some writing fundamentals that may not have been up to snuff after high school. I remember thinking this is the way education should be. That experience didn’t linger however and it was back to a slog of just regular book learning.

    I have thought on this over an over the last few decades. I took the huge Stanford AI course by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig. I did well, but it was a disappointment in presentation and did not feel to be the accelerated learning sensation I’d had all those years ago at Blackhawk.

    Why are we re-writing Calculus books over and over? Why isn’t there some insanely great multimedia interactive national curriculum for this sort of stuff. Why when we are busing kids around aren’t they on tablets watching lectures and doing interactive lessons?

    I have seen the argument over and over that kids need individualized attention by teachers to do well, but I fail to understand why all the drudge assignment work and pre-scripted presentations have to be created and done by those same teachers. Why aren’t the teachers more like facilitators helping the kids to navigate and understand the material as created and presented by the truly best presenters online?

    We frequently find mistakes in the material our child brings home that the teachers have prepared. We send it back with corrections explained to the teachers, but why should I have to proof read the teacher’s material? And our local elementary school is supposedly among the best here in Maryland. I can only imagine how abysmal the homework assignments are at poorer schools. Again, why are the teachers creating the homework assignments? I understand tailoring the explanations to the students as they struggle to master something, I don’t understand why the bulk of of assignments have to be custom created by the teachers, especially when they are going to flub it so often.

    My wife and I spend a great deal of time educating our daughter, I feel it is almost home schooling and she gets very little from school itself. While she is an straight A student and we are proud, I am also angry we have to invest so much time and energy to teach her what she should be getting in school. Yes our daughter absolutely wants harder assignments and material in school, but the teachers hold back students like our daughter to keep the material at a level the bulk of the class can keep up with.

    --
    Letter To Iran
  10. Computer Lib / Dream Machines by Alrescha · · Score: 2

    Ted Nelson's Computer Lib / Dream Machines (c) 1974 has a section on educational systems, including PLATO.

    The tagline was "You can and must understand computers NOW". Challenge accepted.

    A.

    --
    ...bringing you cynical quips since 1998
  11. Back in the Day... by frank_adrian314159 · · Score: 4, Informative

    I took online courses on PLATO and wrote simple games for it. The hardware was laughable by today's standards - plasma screens that glowed orange text (and lines!) from a dark blue background with touch input provided on about a 1/2" grid coupled with hideously clunky keyboards having their own special function keys - but it was reasonably reliable and allowed some of the first really large scale research on CHI.

    Not that anyone other than researchers actually gave a crap about that last part.

    But the system was fun to write programs for. It had a pretty OK language for the day, called TUTOR, that contained necessary primitives to make it Turing complete along with others to let you write onto the screen in a variety of ways. Again, pretty primitive by today's standards, but enough to teach programming with - they were debugging the interpreter (I think Fortran) and I played with it once. Pretty advanced for the time with breakpoints being highlighted.

    And of course this is back in the late 1970's. Before the PC was a gleam in IBM's eye. The whole thing ran as on a huge CDC 6600 running a custom OS (as many were, in those days). Odd instruction set by an even odder designer you may have heard of - guy named Seymour Cray. Quirkier than hell with 60-bit words, 18-bit address space, and 6-bit bytes (yes, we spoke octal). But that was back in the day when minicomputers were eating the lunch of the mainframe boys. CDC, whom the University of Illinois partnered with to productize the system, couldn't muster the resources or talent to market this system while swirling down the toilet.

    And, like so many things in computing, we see progress, good ideas thwarted by, well, nothing but the fact that people are short-sighted and, if something doesn't make a buck for someone, we drop it on the floor. So it goes...

    --
    That is all.
  12. PLATO retorspective at the Computer HIstory Museum by Doctor-R · · Score: 3, Informative

    On June 3, 2010, the Computer History Museum hosted a 6-session conference on the PLATO learning system. Session 1 was entitled "A Culture of Innovation: What Don Bitzer Wrought." https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Session 2 was entitled "Innovations in Hardware: Mission-based Developments Led Other Places." https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Session 3 was entitled "PLATO Software: Driven by a Clear, Compelling Challenge." https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Session 4 was entitled "Online Education & Courseware: Lessons Learned, Insights Gleaned." https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Session 5 was entitled "PLATO Games: An Early, Robust Community of Multiplayer, Online Games." https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Session 6 was entitled "An Early Online Community: People Plus Computing Grows Communities." https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

  13. Missing the point by jtara · · Score: 3, Interesting

    A lot of posters are missing the point, and stating that it's understandable that he didn't know about Plato, given it's limited availability.

    Perhaps excusable. I read Computer Lib/Dream Machines and, yes, that was my first knowledge of Plato. And I was a Computer Science student and hobbyist.

    But what he stated is that he did not have the opportunity to learn about computers. That's total nonsense. He apparently just avoided it. Any college student in engineering, social sciences, etc. in the 70's would have plenty of opportunity to take conventional classes, and in most schools they would have been required.