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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SFWEM.NET is the San Francisco Wireless Emergency Net, which is a mesh network that’s being built out by amateur radio operators with the intention of being a communications backup in time of emergency — when phone and data networks may be locally overwhelmed or not functional. Beside that, however, it’s an interesting experiment for amateur radio operators seeking to understand the benefits and limitations of “wi-fi” as a long-distance tool.The wi-fi that most people know is range-limited and often flakey.  SFWEM works with directional antennas that have far greater range, and with higher radio power (permitted to amateur radio operators) on a band of radio frequencies not available for public use. So rather than being stuck with a 50-foot maximum range, we can get good connections over distances of 20+ miles. The connections are still line-of-sight, meaning that one antenna must be able to literally “see” the antenna on the other end that it’s connecting to. Any buildings, trees or hills in between the two will reduce or eliminate the signals.

So the idea is to create a mesh or network of interconnected stations to cover the space — in this case the northern end of San Francisco Bay, and soon the southern end of Marin County — with stations that automatically relay communications from one node of the mesh to the next. And as long as even one mesh node has a connection to the Internet, all of the other interconnected mesh nodes can reach the Internet (and each other).

My “interconnection” consists of the packet radio station, which is linked to the amateur packet radio network in the area (in my case to KE6JJJ in Bernal Heights, and to NøARY in the South Bay). And two nodes on the SFWEM mesh. The link between the two is software. A JNOS software system running on a Raspberry Pi4 computer. JNOS can send and receive messages on the packet side, and can send, forward and receive messages using regular Internet-based email.

The whole setup is currently solar powered. Summer in San Francisco is cold, and sometimes foggy, but there are enough sunny days that the batteries can make it. (Winter, with different sun angles, is a bit more challenging.) Currently (May 2021) I’m testing to determine how long the solar powered system can supply both the packet and the SFWEM systems, as well as solving some issues with how many different voltages are required for all of this equipment, and how efficient the whole power supply thing can be.

Lots more to say; enough for now.

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We (the team here) have been struggling with the color on Logitech C920 and C922 webcams recently. We’re preparing for a big international conference in November when the cameras will be in around-the-clock use. Initially each camera had a nice color balance, but after a couple of weeks each of them acquired an “underwater” blueish cast, and things that should have appeared white in the picture turned a spooky underwater blue!

Some of the blueness is due to where we have located our webcams — they’re in rooms with good outdoor light, but no direct sunlight, so the ambient lighting is saturated with blue skylight. But, beyond that, the cameras over-emphasized the blue. They were trying to auto-correct, but slewed way too far blue. Instead of compensating for our blue light, they were over-emphasizing it. Today we solved the problem!

The Camera Settings App

Logitech provides a Camera Settings app (for Mac OS in our case) that you can install to modify the way the camera sees things. (Download from > logitech.com/support/C930c ) Download it and install it on the computer, then connect your camera and fix its settings.

The app exposes five settings under its Advanced tab (see screenshot). The adjustment we needed was to Auto white balance. Turning it off (the little toggle switch), and then adjusting the color temperature (the xxxxK value) fixed our cameras so they produce a pleasing color output under various light conditions. That’s pretty much it.

In our case, I had to turn it all the way to 6500K to get a pleasing effect in daytime lighting conditions. At night, with incandescent (or LED adjusted to incandescent color temperatures) we have to modify it, but honestly it’s so easy to use the Camera Settings app that we can set it once for each online session and let it run.

The other adjustments do what you’d expect, and we have not needed to fiddle with them, as our problem was just the blueish cast — which is now gone!

C920 users

This worked for both our Logitech C920 and our C930 cameras, even though the C920 support page doesn’t give you a path to download this software, and even though Logitech does not list the C920 as a supported camera for this app. So if you’re using a C920, be sure to go to the support page for the C930 to download this software. It won’t let you pan or zoom (features of the C930), but you can fix the color.)

Logitech Brio

Postscript (Dec 7, 2020): We eventually ended up with a Logitech Brio webcam that has maintained its (proper) color balance for weeks. It can also be configured by the Camera Settings app, but it’s a far better camera in the first place.

The post Got the Logitech C920/C922 blues? appeared first on Sky's Blog.

When you’re preparing for an online interview (Zoom, Skype), there are a few things you can do to really help it be a truly professional shoot. These tips are for both the interviewer and the interviewee. And they are the tips I suggest to interviewees on the Exploring Leadership podcast.

°    Pick a quiet room. Any conversations around you, open windows with conversations, or traffic noise, will be distracting. (Traffic particularly tends to create “rumble” while you’re recording.)

°   Use earbuds or a headset that contains a microphone, if possible. This brings the mic closer to your mouth and yields better sound than using your computer’s microphone. Earbuds or earphones also reduce the possibility of echo or feedback.

°   If you must use the computer mic, then remember not to type or fiddle on the keyboard during the shoot, and try not to rustle papers or tap the table, as the microphone will pick up these sounds.

°    Avoid echos and reverberation by picking a room with very little echo. Carpets reduce echos. Drapes or window blinds reduce echos. Partitions reduce echos.

°    Find a comfortable chair (without a high back) and position yourself against a flat, light colored, solid wall, facing the computer straight on. You should be about 5 feet (just under 2 meters) from the camera. Looking at the zoom video preview, center yourself and make your head take up about ½ the vertical space in the picture. Eliminate sharp lined objects that might be behind you — they can be distracting — things like kitchen clutter, bookshelves, or windows looking out on passersby.

°    If possible, have light coming at your face from the front. A table lamp works. A window opposite you works. A window behind you is likely to be terrible. Basically you want the background and your face to have the same amount of light, so you may have to experiment.

°    Adjust the camera angle so it is looking “straight” at you. i.e. Not like it’s on your desk and you’re peering down into a well. If necessary, put your laptop computer up on a few books to raise it. It should be approximately at the level of your mouth or eyes, not looking up like a bug on the rug.

°    If you’re “filming” with a phone or tablet, it’s even more important to set the device up on a pile of books, or propped against something, to hold it steady. Do not attempt to shoot hand-held unless you wish to induce nausea!

Ready to go!

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London is full of parks both public and private. Yes, private in that they’re fenced off and you need a key to access. Neighbors might have a key — others do not. And parks that have been there hundreds of years.

In San Francisco we’re not used to this concept of private parks. Frequently one encounters brass plates in the sidewalk stating “Right to pass… by permission of owner…” and in some cities, like New York, owners of private property that is open for trespass will close off their right-of-way once a year, just to enforce their right of ownership.

The dog sign might be related to this second sign, shown below, that is posted in Golden Gate Park, in San Francisco. I’d guess that giving the bison psychoactive substances might induce bison-related antisocial behavior. Or worse.

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The Federal Communications Commission [FCC] in the United States has voted to nullify the common carrier status of ISPs, and thus to kill net neutrality, but of course other nations may not do so and I think there are customer actions that could make it difficult for carriers to run roughshod over this principle. The FCC calls their own action “Restoring Internet Freedom” and I, along with millions of others, contend that it’s only restoring the freedom for carriers to differentiate and prioritize, and charge as they see fit, making it more difficult for us common folks in the long run.

On the positive side, improved and more timely data service seems really attractive. People want it. Faster and stutter-free movies. Voice-over-IP calls without interruptions. Gaming and hugely-fast downloads. So there is actually some consumer pressure to prioritize.

Personally I think most of this is “entertainment motivated” in that the customers who care will be mostly the “consumers” — not businesses and not nonprofits. That’s because even if ISPs charge businesses more for these premium prioritized services, the big businesses will pony up and pay for it. Small businesses and individuals will be less able to do this, and that’s a big part of the problem.

So here’s how I think things will play out:

Advertising — The first thing that’ll happen, and it will be soon, though it’s not specifically limited by net neutrality, is that ISPs will look at your web usage and keep track of the sites you visit. They’ll make money by selling this data to third parties. Are you visiting Amazon.com a lot? You’re probably shopping. Are you visiting REI.com a lot? You’re shopping for outdoor gear. Visting Toyota.com a lot? Shopping for a new car. This kind of information is of great use and worth money to retailers, advertisers, car manufacturers. This kind of data is already commercially shared from web sites to advertising networks, but when ISPs can gather and sell this information, they’ll make money from it. And what’s more, ISPs can collect the data without your knowledge, and without leaving any evidence that they are doing so. Other web sites and advertisers do not have that advantage.

An ISP can also sniff the content of your (unencrypted) email, or your file downloads, which is something a web site cannot do. In other words, the ISP can create an open book full of information it can sell, because it is capable of monitoring every unencrypted communication you make through its connection. You may know that Google’s gmail can sniff your gmail traffic and will present advertising based on the contents of your mail — the ISPs would be able to do this regardless of where your email is held, if the connections are unencrypted.

The Let’s Encrypt project, which has ramped up mightily in the past year, aims to make it easier to protect traffic between you and the web sites you use, by making web site content unreadable by ISPs. The ISPs can still see which sites you use and how long you’re using each site, but when a web site is encrypted (HTTPS) the ISP can’t see which pages you’re viewing, nor what content you’ve viewed or submitted. (And you can also protect all of your network traffic from your ISP using a VPN, which I’ll discuss later.)

So here’s how I think this is all going to play out over a time period of one to three years (2018 to 2020):

The Inspection Scenario — To shape and prioritize your traffic, the ISP wants to understand (and prioritize) the type of data packets you’re sending. In theory and as far as the technology is concerned, all packets are just binary data, but in practice an ISP can look inside those packets (see deep packet inspection) and make conjectures about which ones are video, or audio, or gaming, or file transfers, and could treat them differently. Such as giving them higher or lower priority. Or charging more for some kinds of data. And because the carrier knows where your packets are going (meaning Disney, or YouTube or Netflix), it can differentiate and then prioritize based on financial agreements it may have (or interests) in those endpoints. So I predict that ISPs, who already have the capability to examine content, will be differentiating in some way based on your content as early as 2018.

Premium Services Plan — If the network manager has the capacity to examine your data, it could charge more for certain types of data — for the data that has more value to you. In other words, the carrier might “take a cut” of the economic value of the packets. This would be a lot like your phone company charging you more money to call a bank than to call a barbershop. Doesn’t happen to phone calls because the phone company (in the US) is a common carrier and regulated thus by the FCC. But that’s what Net Neutrality did for data carriers — and that’s now been rescinded by the FCC. I predict that ISPs will announce premium pricing for some types of content by 2019 — starting with voice-over-IP or video — and will promise to prioritize such types of traffic, for that price.

Transfer of costs to the supplier — Using a process we call zero-rating, an ISP may make certain types of content effectively free to its customers. They could make web access free, but inject advertising. They could make music “free” as T-Mobile has (meaning certain sites are free). Or throttle the delivery of (low-quality) video as Verizon has. Zero-rating has the effect of making other content more expensive, and of excluding content or providers based on criteria invisible to the customer. I predict that during 2018 more ISPs will first offer to accelerate certain content (such as video) for a price to the customer, then begin soliciting suppliers themselves to underwrite this, and eventually contend that this saves the end user from having to bear this cost.

Premium Sites Plan — The network manager could also charge customers more, or give more reliable or faster service, for traffic from specific providers. “Get your Disney movies faster and without glitches – $19.95 a month” is what I’d expect to hear within a few years. This would be done by prioritizing all traffic from Disney to you. Or any set of providers. Web sites. Email. And so forth. Any service the ISP thinks it can charge extra for, it will. I predict that by 2019 we will see Top-100 Premium Sites Plans from ISPs. Something that would have been illegal under the Obama-era FCC rules of net neutrality.

HTTPS (web) encryption — We’ve already reached the point where around half of web sites use HTTPS encryption to keep pages and submitted forms private. This will increase to 90% by 2020 and will frustrate the ISPs ability to look inside your interaction with these web sites.

Encrypted email — Here I’m pessimistic. People using standalone email, such as Apple Mail or Entourage, Outlook, Thunderbird apps on computers, have had encryption available for 20 years, though it hasn’t been easy to use until the last year or two. I predict email encryption will only slightly increase by 2020. However, more and more customers use outlook.com and gmail.com and services that use HTTPS encryption on their webmail interfaces, which renders email contents opaque to ISPs. This is a mitigating factor that will continue to improve the privacy of email, except that the email hosting company can, of course, still read your mail.

The Resistance — How could you prevent this kind of predatory behavior? Well even today, you could use a Virtual Private Network [VPN] to encrypt everything between your computer and the net. The encrypted packets are tunneled to another location (beyond your ISP), where they emerge onto the public Internet. For example, if you’re in San Francisco using “BigBad ISP” as your ISP, your computer might encrypt everything and send it to New York City, where it might emerge on a “GoodGuy ISP” network. BigBadISP would lose the ability to examine your data, and consequently could only charge you one rate for all traffic. That wouldn’t prohibit GoodGuy from doing something on its end, of course, but presumably you’d choose to emerge in friendly territory. I predict that by 2018 VPNs will be used by 20% of individuals and that ISPs will discourage their use by limiting VPN traffic. I predict that by 2019 ISPs will differentially charge more for VPN traffic from non-business customers or will require that customers upgrade to more expensive business or “Pro” plans in order to use a VPN. And I think that by 2020 ISPs will block VPN traffic from consumer accounts.

Higher Priced Privacy — And with VPNs blocked, ISPs will offer “Privacy services” for an additional price. In other words, if your ISP can’t see and make money off your traffic, they’ll charge you more to pay for the difference.

So the bottom line here is that businesses are in the business of making money by offering services. ISPs have offered connectivity for many years. That connectivity was priced initially based on bandwidth, then on data volume (particularly for mobile data), and now ISPs want to price their service on the value of the data. They’ll attempt to charge both their customers and the businesses who want to interact with their customers. They’ll offer “prioritized” services for an extra fee where there was no fee before. They’ll throttle services that don’t comply.

Because they can inspect customer behavior and data, they’ll profit by monetizing the value of the information about their own consumer customers. If that becomes difficult because of encryption, they’ll charge the customer an extra fee to protect his own data, under the guise that this is an improvement.

Net neutrality, and its interpretation under law, has largely protected consumers from this scenario for years. Now you have my predictions about how it could all unravel in just a few years.

The post After Net Neutrality appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Net Neutrality — Its core is that 1. all bits/packets on the Internet have equal priority; and 2. all endpoints on the Internet are interconnected and traffic is accepted and delivered without prejudice to and from each and all of these endpoints.

The network operators (as data carriers) find better and better ways to carry traffic faster and cheaper (and perhaps more profitably overall), but to date it has been Internet pioneers, entrepreneurs, commerce, media, news and online services who have created new uses of this Internet platform, not the traffic carriers themselves.

The opponents of net neutrality want to eliminate the neutrality principles.

They tell us this is so the carriers can innovate and develop new services, and better manage their own networks. I’d say there’s some value in the management issue, but since the 1990s, carriers have been developing new capabilities, higher speeds, and the ability to handle more traffic even with net neutrality in place. What the elimination of net neutrality would allow them to do is charge based on type or origin of traffic — in other words, the carriers would presumably charge more for traffic that’s more valuable to the user, participating more directly in the profitability of every new service innovated by any entrepreneur. And also “calling the shots” on which services may have to pay the carriers more to prioritize, or even handle their type of traffic in the first place.

How do I know this? From conversations and news reports in the mid-1990s.

Net Neutrality has, so far, prohibited this kind of behavior and left the networks as essentially common carriers carrying all data without discrimination.

Legislation and the Internet — Legislation passed in the US, or China, or Iran or Brazil has localized effect for the most part. But legislation in the US, in the case of neutrality at least, will affect vast amounts of global Internet traffic, and the elimination of Net Neutrality in US law, followed by its elimination in practice by network managers, will have global effects.

Political Questions — This is not a “political” question. It is an economic question. Carriers would like to benefit more from the data they carry — currently they carry all traffic uniformly regardless of its content or economic value. Every bit costs the same as the next bit to carry, though some services use more bits. But financial data doesn’t cost any more to carry bit-for-bit than a Disney movie. Although Dems and GOP in Congress are coming down on pro- and con- sides of Net Neutrality, in real life it affects all of us equally. Seeing that Dems are more pro-neutrality, they are attempting to save neutrality which will benefit Republicans every bit as much. The political arguments are really based on taking sides for or against the large network operators, and for or against live citizens.

Why it’s Important — Neutrality permits netizens to build platforms (software, hardware) without regard for whether their traffic will be speeded, blocked or slowed by communication providers. That’s just it in a nutshell. It has been an essential part of net life for many years.

It also permits “anyone” to connect to the net. There are no special fees based on type of business or type of content. Instead they’re based on volume or speed. Fairly and equally. Some content may be blocked legally, but this is rather narrow in scope, and is determined in law, not by network carriers.

As a fundamental principle of the Internet, Net Neutrality is essential to openness and innovation.

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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:

The post Early Computer Conferencing – 1973 at Northwestern University appeared first on Sky's Blog.

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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