Message from Richard Ballard: 12/13/2003 6:19 PM
Paul:
I am not recognizing what Python is and how, for example, it relates to the early Plato system. I know Plato and those involved there very well.
Don Bitzer's Plato, Vic Bunderson's TICCIT, and Alfred Bork and my PCDP were NSF's three "centers of excellence" projects during the 1970s. Andy Molnar was the NSF administrator for Technical Innovations in Education, funding manager and evaluator, for the three projects, 1970-78. Subsequent to that CDC's Chairman and Plato Project was one of my IDC TALMIS client's during the early 1980s when Mark 1 was born. Paul Tenczar was the principal programmer and system designer during the early Plato period at Urbana. He subsequently developed the CRT-based Plato terminals for REGENCY and recast the Plato work as a Computer Based Training (CBT) system used in part by the US Air Force for CBT applications. The other academic Plato site was at Florida State under Jess Poore. Paul, Jess, and I were mid-life crazy buddies during the early 1980's. Jess even took me to Plains, GA to meet then President Carter at his home there. Jess had been his "computer consultant" when Governor of Georgia.
All three projects had software authoring running graphical terminals on time-share networks. Plato and PCDP were interactive graphical languages built around student-teacher natural language tutorial conversations. TICCIT ran on a network of two Digital PDP computers -- one handling communications to a "home television network" of TV terminals and the other managing TV tape playbacks to selected screens. TICCIT had networks in Utah, Scottsdale, and Reston. It employed a special keypad pedagogy designed by Bunderson to make dialogs fairly trivial interactions.
So far I am not seeing any of
the interactive techniques employed by these projects in today's page turning
"electronic book/web site" presentations.
All those projects were deep in
recognizing user patterns of thought and providing rich interactive paths of
remediation and guidance. They aimed at being teacher/tutor substitutes. The
only serious use of these methods to survive the introduction of micros was my
work at Educulture, Apple, and through Interactive Productions (Mark 1), Paul's
work at Regency and later with CBT, and via work coming out of EDS in Dallas,
or ATT and Deltak in Chicago, IBM in Boca and Atlanta, etc.
Ultimately all of these companies did some early form of experimentation 1979-85 with more or less interactivity:
|
Addison‑Wesley
Publisher American Guidance
Corporation American Management Assoc. ATI‑American Training
Inc Apple Computer Corporation Arista‑Regents‑Hachette
Corp Atari Computer Corporation Bell and Howell Corporation W.C. Brown Publisher Children's Television
Workshop Control Data Corporation Creative Publications Corp Deltak Corporation |
Walt Disney Productions Eduware Software Publishing Esquire Publishing Company Fujitsu Corporation Ginn and Company,
Publishers Grolier Electronic
Publishing Harcourt, Brace, Javonovich Houghton‑Mifflin,
Publisher IBM, Software Publishing McGraw‑Hill
Corporation Milton Bradley Toy Company Minn. Educ. Comp.
Consortium Prentice‑Hall,
Publishers |
Random House Publishing Co. Readers Digest Publishing Science Research Associates Scott‑Foresman,
Publishers Singer Corporation Silver Burdett, Publisher Society for Visual
Education Southwestern Publishing
Corp. Time Share Corporation Tratec John Wiley & Sons, Publisher World Book Publishing
Company Xerox Publishing Group |
After 1985 most direct student user interactivity switched to book/site reading with virtually no retained knowledge of the student except perhaps lesson completion. That was the crash that triggered the creation of Interactive Productions (first KFI proprietorship) and the Mark X Series to resolve the economic production barrier to all content knowledge capture and not give up on direct system learning (from students).
Where does Python play in all this and why should NSF care?
Dick