View a sampling of V.I. work online.

At the beginning of a meeting there might be a long horizontal paper unrolled across the wall. Eileen would, from start of meeting, begin sketchhng out words, clouds, little people, relationships, all the way thru the end of the meeting. These murals served as conceptual records of the meetings — embedding not only ideas, but interrelationships. Particularly relevant to NextNow was her Engelbart mural, viewable on VisualInsight.net

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This is what I’d call a state of inquiry, in which one discards any pretense of sophistication and critism, and simply observes — takes in all aspects of what is happening, and reserves judgment and critique.

It’s actually akin to the state of mind that works best when you’re first viewing a film. You observe a lot, but initially there’s limited information, so an approach in which you let it all flow in and hold your judgments ’til later can be the best strategy.

I think Bill’s approach is often similar. At least at the beginning, before sparking a conversation, he often puts people together with no detailed plan for outcomes, and basically makes or “holds the space” for something to happen. He makes the introduction — and lets it go from there. You can be sure he doesn’t do it randomly — there’s always some hint — but it leaves plenty of space for exploration.

Wish I could give you concrete examples. In my case there some fuzzy cases. My professional life has been in Computer Science. But it has been often at the fuzzy edge of what used to be called “man-machine” interfaces or communication. It meant working in 3D visualization, data visualisation, “art” to some degree, and ultimately with Digital Audio Workstations and the composition of music. Along the way various NextNow events included people with interesting ideas and projects that influenced my work — and for sure influenced it visually.

PS: For the 2015 events, I just now found the third page link, so March,  April and May are now all accounted for.

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Tonight I sit and share with you my thoughts about our friend who we sometimes call “Mr Human Glue” who has played a creative and interesting role in our lives. At least in mine.

How I Came to It

Way back in the 1970s I created a technology project at Northwestern University where we sought to introduce and experiment with online communication and education. As a young professor I was into the tech and because we were so far “ahead of the curve” part of my role was to discover and meet other experimenters in related work. At some point a fellow called me up (or wrote on paper!) to say that he had a grant to “call people up and introduce them.” I believe it was an NSF grant. My friend who team-taught a seminar with me — Bob Johansen — and I had some number of such calls, introduced and moderated by this facilitator, and relationships were sparked that went on for decades.

I say that by way of introducing here the concept of “professional introducer.”

Not an entirely new concept, of course, because we know that centuries ago artists had studios where they worked together and often novel ideas arose, musicians and intellectuals had salons, and the univeersity concept certainly served to cross-polinate (ccompared to guilds and trades).

Bob and I had done a collaboration at Northwestern — teaming up to create a Seminar on College Teaching (so-named by our Dean Claude Mathis) in which we intentionally brought together graduate students and faculty from many departments, using this mix to spark new ways of viewing and supporting and conducting education (and expanding our use of “distance learning” technologies). (I’ve writen some about this Computers And Teaching project.)

NextNow

So it must have been 2003 — Bill Daul came along (but no recollection of how we met) with his idea to formally bring people together, which he named NextNow, and it was familiar and very natural. I “signed up” immediately. I don’t recall whether NextNow had coalesced around Doug Engelbart already, or not, but early NextNow meetings such as the one at Fort Mason (using World Cafe as its structure – this may have been only the second NextNow meeting) included a wonderfully broad participation from all over the San Francisco Bay Area. I can’t overestimate how many people I met thru those events – they were miraculous. (Also see Engelbart on Wikipedia)

NextNow meetings were held at many venues, though Doug’s house may hold the record, and events held at or with the collaboration of MediaX at Stanford I think were some of the most fruitful.

For a long period – perhaps most of the life of NextNow – operations, events and meetings at The NextNow Collaboratory in Berkley played an underlying structural role and provided more of an ongoing physical presence than the more “itinerant” meetings.

When I decided on a career redirect in 2015 I celebrated by putting together a paroxism of several NextNow meetings in downtown San Francisco (in March then April and May) we used a model we’d been improving over the years – presentations; small groups; re-convene and synthesize. One of many models the group had tried.

In conclusion (of this one note) I want to recognize publicly that Bill’s work as founder and listener-in-chief allowed me, and certainly a number of others, to meet new people and new-yet-connectable ideas, over a period of maybe a couple of decades, that otherwise just might not have happened. And there was often a special synergy when people “collided” from disparate disciplines.

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I’ve already remarked on some predictions I made in 1973, including working from home, email, co-working spaces and online community access to information and learning. There were a lot of people working on these concepts in the 1970s. Many people had these and similar ideas, and much of the work presaged today’s online educational and social media. My personal focus was on communication in education, and my work involved using a supercomputer (and later a minicomputer) as a hub for education and distance-independent group communication.

Notable among those I interacted with

Community computing—People’s Computing Company (Bob Albrecht) in Menlo Park. Resource One (Lee Felsenstein) on Howard in San Francisco. Whole Earth Store (Rich Green) in Evanston (and Berkeley).

Computer conferencing—Murray Turoff (New Jersey Institute of Technology and formerly the Office of Emergency Preparedness). NSF project managers.

Networks—Doug Engelbart and team (Stanford Research Institute, SRI). I was at Doug’s lab he day they connected to the “Arpanet.”

(There’s a whole additional thread of people who worked in computer-based-education, which I’ll write up later.)

Resource One

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Here are the seven Computers And Teaching newsletters from the project.

Newsletter #1 ERIC abstract (download full PDF from archive.org):

A brief overview of the Computer Aids to Teaching Project is first presented. The workshops, seminars, demonstrations and open house events conducted in the course of the project are described, and the information services provided are discussed. An outline of the project’s 1st workshop designed to introduce users to the PLATO IV computer-assisted instructional system is included, along with instructions on how to operate a computer terminal. Lastly, a brief article reviews the development, current status and future potential of ARPANET, a geographically distributed network of different computers interconnected by a communication system based upon high speed message switching.

Newsletter #2 ERIC abstract (download full PDF from archive.org):

Details relating to the daily operation of the Computer Aids to Teaching project are provided, along with some feedback from readers of the previous issue of the newsletter. Following this are a brief article which discusses the possibility of making man-machine interactions more personal and a review of two seminars which dealt with the establishment of a National Science Network, a net of computers and computer users connected by high speed communications lines. A description of HYPERTEXT, a student-controlled instructional system consisting of pieces of discrete texts, is presented, followed by a look at the future possibilities of computer terminals in the home. Lastly, some instructions on how to operate a computer terminal are given.

(This newsletter contains the COTTAGE INDUSTRY article.)

Newsletter #3 ERIC abstract (download full PDF from archive.org):

Included in this issue of the newsletter are details about the usage of the currently available computer terminals,information about equipment soon to be added to the Computer Aids to Teaching, Project, and an announcement describing a workshop and open house held in March of 1973. Some recent publications are cited and a student guide to HYPERTEXT is provided, along with an author’s guide to HYPERAUTHOR. Lastly, instructions on how to operate a computer terminal are presented.

Newsletter #4 ERIC abstract (download full PDF from archive.org):

Information relating to the installation of the PLATO-IV computer terminal is presented. This terminal is connected to the University of Illinois’ system, making it possible for personnel associated with the Computer Aids to Teaching Project to keep in touch with the development of the large-scale PLATO system. Problems associated with the authoring of programs, with their modification and adaptation to new hardware systems and different universities, and with the cost of developing computer-assisted instructional (CAI) courses are discussed. Also offered are details on a workshop and seminar run in conjunction with the Project and information about a CAI summer workshop for teachers held at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Newsletters #5/6 ERIC abstract (download full PDF from archive.org):

This combined issue first gives descriptions of the PLATO terminal and of an interface which has been completed to allow them to be linked to the CDC 6400 system at Northwestern University. Details are next provided relating to four events; 1) an open house at the Computer Aids to Teaching Project; 2) the Computer Caravan, a traveling computer exhibit; 3) the summer 1973 workshop at the State University of New York at Stony Brook for computer resource personnel; and 4) the Festival of Educational Alternatives at De Paul University. Two new articles are presented, one on the evaluation of computer-assisted instruction and the other on community uses of interactive computers. Also included are reprints of several articles which appeared in earlier issues of the newsletter.

Newsletter #7 ERIC abstract (download full PDF from archive.org):

Recent developments in Northwestern University’s Computer Aids to Teaching Project are reviewed in the first section of this issue. Included are pieces of information about the use of the PLATO IV system, and about increasing access to System Development Corporation’s Educational Resources Information Center(ERIC) files, along with news about personnel, facilities and equipment changes relating to the Project. The second half of the newsletter offers an article which outlines some of the concepts and issues facing designers of computer-based learning/information exchanges. It reviews briefly some of Ivan Illich’s basic ideas for de-schooling society and for building dynamic learning webs in which teachers and students come together as their needs and interests dictate. In addition, it touches upon the role of the computer in such a system, the types of information found in the system, and some possible means of financing such endeavors.

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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…Here are some of the things I wrote. They’re based on conversations I was having with many people at the time, so they’re not all my own original thoughts, but look at how many of them we’ve been able to realize by 2017!

The article is entitled COTTAGE INDUSTRY (download PDF) and is a forecast of what’s to come, viewed from 1973.

First, I proposed working from home (in your bathrobe or whatever):

As our economy moves more and more toward services and farther away from manufacturing, people find themselves doing tasks they could really be doing at home, if it were acceptable. Take programming a computer with time-sharing, the programmer could work from a back room, and could work any hour of the night or day.

And my favorites – co-working spaces, coffee, teleconferencing, cloud computing, email, voicemail, flat-rate all-you-can-eat phone plans:

Or, if one felt the desire, it would be possible to set up neighborhood work-centers,’ where people gathered to do their work and drink coffee. Communication would be carried out on the telephone or picturephone. “Paper” based jobs would be carried out in conjunction with computer communication systems, in which the computer stored all information. Letters would be written by typing them into the computer then when the recipient signed-on, the letter would be printed on his terminal. A secretary could be located in Chicago for a boss in San Francisco; the secretary would handle communications and route letters via computer to the boss, who would dictate a reply. The reply would then be played back automatically when the secretary called the boss later in the day, typed into the computer and routed to the originator.

Is this a pipe dream? Perhaps not! There are people in telephone companies today who look forward to the day when all calls will be included in the monthly charge. It would then be advantageous to work long-distance. The telephone network would hold your calls, record callers’ numbers, route your calls to another number, or “camp” on a busy line. Once the computer has been connected to this network, just imagine the possibilities!

Personal Computing — or at least home “terminals”:

When PLATO-IV plasma-displays get down to $700 each (roughly the cost of a color TV console), people will begin to think of buying them for their families. Learning will take place in the evening, after school and during lunch breaks. The school may have to take on more socializing tasks — teaching kids how to deal with each other and how to settle disputes.

Social networking and social organizing online:

They may begin seriously trying to direct a student’s inquiry, starting neighborhood study groups oriented toward solution of local problems. And the giant communication network may be used to form larger nationwide task-forces of people, communicating via the computer.

Community computing (credit here to Vic Bunderson et al), online shopping, social effects:

One of the first incursions into interactive computer controlled networks is the TICCIT (say “ticket”)system, by MITRE Corporation. This is centered around a cable TV system in Reston, Virginia. The cable TV will be computer controlled, and will provide information and educational materials to citizens on their own television sets, as well as regular TV fare. Signals are sent to the individual TVs in the homes of children studying lessons, displaying information much like that PLATO-IV will display on its screens. The child presses a key on his telephone to respond. Eventually keyboards will be included. Shopping can be done the same way. Items are displayed on the screen, and buttons are pushed to order. Information of community interest can be displayed, and citizens can even vote on issues.

TICCIT is designed to be a local system, comprising a few hundred homes. Can you imagine what could be done on a truly large system such as PLATO-IV with thousands of homes? It could change the structure of society.

Post Script: What did I miss?

Well I definitely missed cell phones. I almost missed personal computers because of my focus on terminals, although a couple of years later (say 1976) I knew about KIM-1 and other kits, which presaged this. I missed hand-held phones and tablet computing and such. I missed the entire software ecosystem that has grown up alongside those technologies, although my next two company startups transitioned into personal computing rapidly. Also, by 1977 I was working with PDP-11/43 systems, which reduced the mainframe to small-room size, and racks of dial-in modems for remote users. So still terminals, but by 1978 I was focusing on the Apple-II, which was the real game-changing device for all of us.

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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.)

At the time I had a Texas Instruments thermal “TTY” style terminal I used at home on a separate phone line installed for the dial-up modem. The terminal belonged to my project and was well beyond anything an individual would have at home. IT was portable in the sense that it had a cover and handle like a big suitcase — and weighed maybe 25 lbs. I also had another dozen CRT style terminals in my lab at the university. And one terminal in my office. A true luxury in those days.

The online conference transcript displays messages in chronological order. Several participating locations had multiple human participants. Particularly Resource One (a community computing center in San Francisco) and the University of Michigan. Participants had to dial in to the main computer and could type while online, so this was an expensive process. To cut the connect time, a couple of locations batched their comments locally, then uploaded them by connecting their computer to ours. You might call this a precursor of email. My recollection is that Arpanet was young in those days, being one of the first networks to include email as a basic capability. PLATO-IV had its equivalent of email in its notes program, which allowed people to create threaded discussions.

Participants in the local conference were:

Long distance online participants included:

Organizations represented:

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Clark was one of the original team who wrote our games. Because we made a habit of sending our development team members to trade shows, Clark had the experience of encountering the team from the newly-formed Spinnaker Software. At the time, DesignWare was a development house and not heavily involved in marketing our individual titles — we served as a “corporate author” for other publishers. The venture we signed with Spinnaker was our first foray into “consumer” educational titles. They published our Story Machine and Facemaker titles. Probably our best known title was Spellicopter.

Many thanks to Clark and our developers for all those good times and good games. Lesley Czechowicz managed the development group and our production operations. Sharmon Hilfinger and then Peter Rosenthal headed sales and marketing.

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Tom’s journey from writer at Financial Times to blogger, to publisher is an interesting one. There are some parallels I’d like to call out.

[Tom’s photo here is by JD Lasica taken during Traveling Geeks 2009] [short interview]

Tom started writing for The Financial Times, then quit to become a blogger and thus one of the disruptors of journalism as it had existed until then. I was reflecting the other day and thinking that in 1970 we could and should have predicted that computers would eventually disrupt our lives. And also caught myself thinking well “how would we know the degree to which they’d be disruptive?” In those days I was thinking I’d get a job in research at IBM, or Kodak, or SRI, or be a university professor (which I was) and just keep doing that, and computers would play an increasingly important role in my life and the world. But, you know, I was pushing the disruptive edge too, without really thinking about it that much. Disruption wasn’t a word we used very often. More on disruption next time.

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Because of my job, and my grad school research, I had privileged access to this computer, and pretty much “run of the farm” after midnight many nights and on weekends, along with the crew who programmed “Chess 1.0” and other delicious software at Northwestern University. Our sponsor, Ben Mittman, was Director of the computer center. Once we had  dial-up (“modem” look it up!) computer terminal access, my nights were spent more via remote access, but this computer still has a special meaning for me.

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You know, in programming (which I do a lot of), there are often little gotchas that require hours or days to figure out. And once you’ve figured them out, it’s easy to forget them if you immediately move on to the next challenge. Working at the level I do, which often requires typing command-line stuff, I’d never remember this stuff character by character unless I used it every day.

For instance, I was exporting a French blog database today (from MySQL), which has lots of é and ï and ç and ô characters in it. These have always given me trouble, because when you’re migrating a MySQL database from one server to another, and you don’t export and import them properly, they just don’t come through as the proper accented characters.

To do it right I’d have to remember this line:

mysqldump  –user=mylogin -p –opt mydbname -r myfile.sql

Now, given the hundreds of different things I do every day, week after week, how would I remember that one?

Jerry’s Brain

Jerry Michalski uses a notable tool —theBrain— to hold links to info and organize it for exploration. He may have the most extensive theBrain in the world, having used the software for more than 15 years. He has a quick introduction to his brain on his Rexpedition site. You can also watch Jerry talk about his brain (30-minute video … breaks all attention span rules).

An (External Memory) Podcast

One of my favorite podcasts is Big Picture Science from Team SETI. On January 20th, 2014, they did a nice cast on how human and computer memory is progressing. The Forget to Remember episode is worth listening to.  And this is a podcast you might like to subscribe to!

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DesignWare’s

Other companies involved in edutainment software in those days included The Learning Company (Rocky’s boots), Davidson, and Spinnaker Software. Many other companies entered the market during the decade. There were also some more “serious education” contenders including Eduware (Algebra series), and Blue Chip Software (stock market games), which we incorporated into DesignWare under Britannica Software in 1985.

My younger son was 9 years old when Spellicopter was published. Today a friend found this link to a YouTube video of Spellicopter being played. Pig out—we loved this! I actually think the YT demo shows the player crashing at the end of each run when they should have beamed the letters down to spell the word on the ground and then landed for more points, but who am I to remember that detail? The instruction manual is probably long gone.

I especially like the humorous touches on the title page (view the video to see) and the little tune that plays. I “composed” a whole bunch of these for our games and still use one of them as an iPhone ringtone.

[youtube W_5d-hcE_d8]

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Since I speculated (a few years ago) that we could create really great mixed-reality^[1] games (or learning experiences, for that matter) that would utilize all sorts of real-world media including SMS^[2], video, telephones^[3], FAX, email and web, I’ve been working to develop more of these games and get them played. I started by developing a scenario-operating-system that could run on a server, “listen” to incoming SMS and email messages, and react appropriately to move “players” through the game. This system is in place today, and listening for certain key words in incoming messages the set players off on a chase through the game of their choosing.

While experimenting with the scenario system, the team and I learned a lot. We learned that people have trouble with SMS messaging. We learned that email works (now that smartphones support email) better. We learned they’ll call a phone number, but they’ll hesitate because they don’t know for sure that the number is in-game. We learned that they like certainty more than experimentation. And we learned they ultimately will be creative if given the right opportunity.

Oh, and there’s a new game being planned right now.

[2] SMS (also called TEXT or TXT in the US) messaging is the first method we used to get messages to and from the players. To avoid certain technical difficulties with SMS, including charges, we used email gateways, which are provided by mobile system operators. These did not work well because many people were unfamiliar with the ways they could send and receive email from their phones.

[3] We used call-in phone messages in almost all of the games. These are answer-only phone numbers where a simple message is played for each caller. Each message describes the next step in the game. I thought it would be fun to customize those messages for the players, but we haven’t gotten around to doing it… it’s a technology challenge that involves call-director, voice-response, XML-controlled systems.

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In 1971 he witnessed two tankers colliding, creating an oil spill in San Francisco Bay, and decided to give up riding in motorized vehicles. He began walking everywhere he went. “I thought that if I started walking, everyone would follow.” So on his 27th birthday, he decided he would stop speaking for just one day “to give it a rest.” “I have to tell you it was a very moving experience…for the very first time I began listening.” He realized that (as a regular speaking human) he listened to only the first few words or sentences when someone was talking, and then “my mind would race ahead” thinking about what “I was going to say in response.” He decided to do this for another day, and another day, and this stretched to a year, and then lasted 17 years. [Continue reading and you can also view the TED talk given by John Francis in 2008…]

During that time, John walked and played the banjo, and wrote in his journal. “I walked up to Ashton, Oregon, where they were offering an environmental studies degree” and enrolled. After two years he graduated with a Bachelor’s degree. Then walked east through Washington, Idaho, and Montana… and he enrolled in the University of Montana (after 2 years of walking)… he registered for one credit, got a key to an office, went to classes, couldn’t afford tuition, but the professors “saved the grades” for later on when he could afford to register and pay.

In the process, he taught courses as well, and “If you weren’t learning, then you weren’t teaching.”

At the University of Wisconsin he wrote about oil spills. Two years later the Exxon Valdez “happened.” And he was the only expert writing about oil spills. John earned a PhD.

“On Earth Day 1990, I began to speak” (again).

“Not speaking […] taught me about listening.”

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