The previous article and video documented my first attempts to use a bow on the cello. Now, a full week later and after taking a couple of lessons, I’m playing a C major scale, some exercise, and doing some fiddling around. As a keyboard player, I find a few things to be challenging. [Read more…]
And now for Something Completely Different
I’m not exactly an A.D.D. poster child. You know that I’m pretty determined to accomplish things I start. But there are times when I try things and then move to something else, leaving a task a bit incomplete. Or I do just enough that it was enjoyable, but not perfect. That doesn’t seem to bother me much. I love the joy of doing something new, and especially something that nobody else has ever done. I’m fine with trying something and leaving it a bit rough around the edges, as long as I learned enough for my own purposes. [Read more…]
Computers And Teaching 1972 and 1973 newsletters
I was recently reviewing the seven newsletters of the Computers And Teaching [CAT] project. I previously commented on an article that predicted the cottage industry of home working that we see around the world today. I kind of missed The Internet, because we were thinking of supercomputers and terminals in those days, but by 1975 our thinking had been changed by the appearance of hobbyist home computer kids. That’s another story.
Here are the seven Computers And Teaching newsletters from the project. [Read more…]
Computers And Teaching 1973
I just reviewed the seven archived newsletters of my Computers And Teaching [CAT] project, written in 1972 and 1973. During that time I led other graduate students, faculty and staff at Northwestern University and the Vogelback Computing Center (a big centralized supercomputer facility) in promoting online educational uses of the computer. There was no network to speak of in those days…computers were just beginning to be able to “dial up” and chat with each other, and the computer terminal was still remarkably new. I was a new faculty member, having just completed a PhD in Computer Science, and my mentors were Ben Mittman (that linked page includes a tribute from me in 2007) and Claude Mathis, who headed unique centers within the university.
I made some guesses about the “cottage industry” that access to computing might support in the future and a lot of them were right. Um, actually everything in my article is commonplace today… [Read more…]
Early Computer Conferencing – 1973 at Northwestern University
I was alerted to the presence online of a transcript of an “online computer conference” I organized in late 1973 when I was a professor at Northwestern University, and running my project called Computers And Teaching [CAT]. Murray Turoff, who was with the (US) Office of Emergency Preparedness had been running conferences limited to government participants, and Bob Johansen (while a graduate student) and I got the idea of doing a conference that would combine physical presence and remote presence, which we held in November, 1973. The PLATO-IV system, of course, had included its own internal online conferencing (serving maybe a couple thousand people at the time), but that was limited to people with PLATO terminals. Our goal was to expand conferencing well beyond that group by using an interactive system I had built.
Online_Computer_Conference_in_1973 (PDF) contains the transcript of this 1973 online conference. (The PDF has been saved in the ERIC system for 43 years. Thank goodness for government-sponsored ed research archives.) If you notice the timestamps on the messages, some interchanges were in real time and many were asynchronous. The time-independence of the conference did actually confuse some of the participants because it was such a new concept. (And I had not implemented many of the commonsense conference components you’d find in a modern system.) [Read more…]
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