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…]
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.
Tom Foremski was just named by LinkedIn to their “
I like to think I’m open and helpful. Not everyone would agree. But the one thing that really annoys me is the email whose title is “…quick question…”