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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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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User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Instead, I discovered that the googlebot may still spot the site and then put up a message saying that the site exists but is not indexed. i.e. the Googlebot still publicizes the existence of the site. It makes Google look like the good guys and us look like the bad guys for putting up a robots.txt. Yay for Google liberating all online information! Boo for us trying to keep our site un-indexed until we’re ready to make it public.I suppose if the site is public, they reason it’s OK to mention its existence. However, most of us did not intend for any results whatsoever to show up in Google, so having it say “the site exists but I can’t index it” is a big of a revelation! Beware of this if you are creating a pre-production test site — your site may still show up in Google searches. Instead, turn on some other protection — like the “Maintenance mode” plug-in for WordPress, so that not only sites but humans can’t use the site. Here’s kind what the Google result looks like:

Mork-A-Bork » Uncategorized
mork-a-bork.info/

A description for this result is not available because of this site’s robots.txt — learn more

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RSS feeds and news readers began to change that. (Thanks Dave[2. Dave Winer].) I use NetNewsWire’s standalone software on my Mac, and online services like Google Reader let you integrate feeds into your iGoogle home page. You can also sync your Google Reader settings across multiple programs and devices. But in the last couple of months, the scene is greatly changing is subtle ways I think people haven’t spotted yet…

With the advent of larger-screen mobile devices (like iPad) and reasonable mobile apps like reeder that sync with Google Reader lists, we’re now reading our news feeds everywhere, and the pace at which we flip through them has greatly accelerated.

We all know the Facebook stickiness phenomenon — you open facebook.com and just keep it open all day and night—news is there, feed is there, friends are there, chat is there, and everything is available on that one site. Same could be said, for some people, for iGoogle or gmail, which are all squished together in one big Google mashup of a “site.” Facebook and Google “have all the eyeballs” and now you don’t stand a chance of picking up very many eyeballs for your own web site. If you put a short URL into your Facebook status/feed pointing to a blog post you just wrote, any of your friends who click to open it will read your blog post on the Facebook page—they never need to leave Facebook, even to read your blog entry.

And since the arrival of  iPad apps like Flipboard [3. I love Flipboard, and I can zoom through dozens of pages on Flipboard by flicking a finger way faster than I can use a mouse and a computer screen, and this really hammers the web server that’s at the target end of the action! Flipboard picks up its clues and links solely from FB and Twitter feeds—you can’t even tell it to track a web site—it only tracks sites and pages that get significant social activity!] pick up FB status and Twitter streams, these apps are besieging web sites with requests for content, and then caching that content on their own sites for later reading. Yeah, you’ve usually got an option to read the full content on the original site, but it’s way at the bottom of whatever you’re reading, and since attention spans are short, you’re only going to read the original once in a while. Flipboard and its cousins are a reason why web site server performance occasionally suffers these days[4. Server performance suffers when searchbots spider a site more rapidly than the server can handle. I discovered Flipboard and other crawlers were impacting small server performance about a month ago, then I got an iPad and discovered why they’re crawling the sites, and I’m impressed with the net result, so I’m finding ways to improve server performance to handle the extra load, thinking that it’ll be worth it in the long run, and that this phenomenon is going to increase.]—they’re positively crawling all over small web sites proactively finding and caching content for their readers to look at later on.

The bottom line is that you have to make all impressions count, regardless of whether they’re on your own web site or on Facebook, Flipboard (or anywhere else). You can no longer count on eyeballs coming to your web site. You brand is wherever the readers’ eyeballs are, and no longer exclusively on your own web site. You’re not in control of this, and you’d better learn to take advantage of the situation and live with it.
— Sky

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Here’s what I experienced with respect to the Traveling Geeks crew.

[youtube rA8VHC_EtiA]

[1] My advice to clients is “Go where your clients and prospects are.” So if you’re a tech writer, and all your clients are spending their time on Facebook, you must be on Facebook. And if they’re tweeting about you, you’d better be on Twitter.

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Susan Bratton, JD Lasica, Renee Blodgett and Robert Scoble discuss these aspects of marketing and customer relations in this roundtable in Cambridge as a part of Traveling Geeks 2009.

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Earlier, in London, some of us had similar conversations with companies who are implementing social media strategies to be in closer touch with their customers. One of the companies I spoke with, in a conversation held under Chatham House Rule (meaning “not for attribution” or “off the record” in US press terminology), the head of customer support told me he had opened a Twitter account, reviews around 500 tweets a day, and helps between 10 and 50 dissatisfied customers resolve problems they’d been having with his company. This apparently takes him only a small amount of time (an hour or two, from what he said) and generates a huge amount of goodwill at very low cost, for his company.

I’ve been advising my clients for at least the past year to not worry about “attracting eyeballs to their web site” but instead to focus on making there presence felt “wherever the customer lives online.” In the case of my customers this means setting up Facebook fan pages and Twitter accounts, and then using those to engage in genuine conversations with customers – not one-way marketing-speak.

Oops, almost forgot – listen to what Susan has to say about all of this!

She calls it Social Influence Marketing and it has three core components: 1) Social Listening; 2) Participation; 3) “Appvertising” (Give-to-get).

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I know already that my first favorites will be technologies that help find and then aggregate information that will make your blog or web site more informative for your readers. Or that make your job as a blogger easier because they help you locate not only your own writings (which believe it or not is a problem for many bloggers) but new information from sources that you trust.

The post Seedcamp pointer appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Then I noticed the hashtag #lrnchat on the tweets and I investigated.
What was going on was that Marcia Connor (Twitter @marciamarcia), who is a learning maven and blogs for Fast Company, had arranged a “TweetChat” which is a Twitter-based discussion that is glued together by hashtags (#lrnchat in this case).  Clark Quinn obliged with the details in his blog. TweetChat.com lets you log in to Twitter (through TweetChat’s website) and then displays (in real time) every public tweet that contains the hashtag you specify. It basically stitches together a “conversation” from hashtagged tweets. In addition, if you write your messages using the TweetChat web site, the correct hashtag is automatically applied to each message, saving you some effort and probably a lot of frustration.

To the user of TweetChat, the exchange looks like a conversation among a bunch of people in a chatroom (some of whom you follow on Twitter and some of whom you don’t follow).

But, the problem is that all of your followers (and followers of others in the chat as well) get spammed with your out-of-context tweets that are intended for the group chat. And the non-TweetChat users only see your messages, not those of their non-friends participating in the chat. They see odd snippets from a conversation, not a coherent whole.

In my case, I knew several of the participants in the chat so I was seeing tweets from 3 or 4 out of the maybe dozen participants, and the chat was about something I know about, so it was reasonable for me to participate, but what about my followers?  What did they think?  They have different interests, and most of them would/were be uninterested in this particular chat.

Well it turned out to be entirely an interesting experience – not just the content of the chat but the way it all worked out over time. I moderated my participation a bit, and tried to always add messages that would make sense out of context, so my followers could benefit even if they weren’t getting all of the participants’ messages. And also, at least one of my followers was interested, figured out what was going on, and joined the chat late in its two-hour run. (Yuck, the word “follower” does sound kind of odd in this context, doesn’t it? – are these my disciples? Not.) I think this tool has a long way to go, and a connection on Skype or any other IM-chat tool would have been much easier and less annoying to those who follow us on Twitter, but overall it turned out to be not only an interesting two-hour experience for me, but beneficial for one of my friends as well.

View the TweetChat in its entirety.

Search Twitter for the #lrnchat hashtag (a different way of finding the same thread of messages).

Near the end of the chat (after about 700 messages were exchanged), we were noticed and picked up as a trend by WTHashtag.com. This was fun because at this point a couple of strangers joined the chat – at least they looked like strangers to me – seemed that they wanted to be noticed, so they joined the conversation and added additional hashtags in their tweets so they could benefit from spinoff traffic from our chat. (Reminds me of the early comment spam in blogs, where people would post a comment on your blog post just to pick up traffic for their own site…Viagra and medications cheap from Canada, etc.)

Here’s Marcia’s description of how she got enmeshed in Twitter and some of her observations on how Twitter can change the type of interactions people have with each other.

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Social Entrepreneuring has become the catch-phrase of the day. I would say that it’s what I’m trying to do when I create digital media programs for kids. I would say that it’s what AirJaldi is doing by expanding the Internet into Northern Indian communities that otherwise wouldn’t have it. And what WSFII members are doing all around the world (similar vein – wireless Internet access). And what Ashoka.org and Ashoka Youth Venture [also see my video interview on AYV – you can log in as a guest] are doing.

From the IFTF announcement by Jackie Copeland-Carson:

A social impact technology field is emerging as multiple innovators creatively apply technology to society’s most compelling social problems. These technologies are powerful tools for building new networks and communities for social action. While technologists work on the cutting edge of locative, crowdsourcing, social media, simulation and gaming, there is a great, untapped need and interest for these technologies among a wide range of social benefit organizations that have limited capacity in this arena.

The Institute for the Future (IFTF) has become an innovator in the application of social media, crowdsourcing, simulation and gaming to the solution of social problems. “Massive, Multi-Player” games scale-up participation and build communities to quickly tap the collective experience and wisdom of people of thousands of people to create ideas that could resolve society’s most pressing challenges. Our award-winning SuperStruct game engaged almost 7,000 people from around the world in designing alternative social structures and practices (Superstruct). Ruby’s Bequest, a partnership with United Cerebral Palsy, is addressing the country’s weakening caregiving system for seniors, aging baby boomers, children and disabled persons. Signtific is IFTF’s global, collaborative research platform, created to identify and facilitate discussion around future disruptions, opportunities and trends in science and technology.

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One of Sam’s recent projects (it’s a couple of years old now) involves a group of Chinese-speaking (reading and writing as well) Tibetans who live in Dharamsala and spend their time chatting with people inside China. About what it is to be a part of the Tibetan culture and how it relates to the rest of China. It’s an actual project with financial supporters and employees, and you can contact me if you’re interested in helping support it. Sam also spends a lot of time in the Tibetan exile settlements in the rest of India, but that’s another story.

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The AirJaldi 2006 Summit, held in Dharamsala, India, was a several-day sequence of presentations, panels and then a week of workshops, dealing with Wireless infrastructure and how these can be used to further the development of the world into a place where veryone can live a healthy, happy life. The meeting was attended by social activists of many sorts, all of whom had an interest in using communications technologies.

Here’s your action item for today: The Video page for Airjaldi I would recommend that you take a look at what’s available there.Here are two of my favorites:

Dr. Rodger Downer, keynote speaker, and President Emeritus of the University of Limerick (Ireland), A Global Perspective on Sustainability {28 minutes running time}

Dr. Richard Stallman, keynote speaker, On free software, human rights, development and GNU. {52 minutes running time IMPORTANT NOTE: the camera was not rolling until shortly after the talk was underway}

Everything else on that page is worth viewing! Just a reminder.

You can find all of my articles on AirJaldi here in my blog. I tried to blog the conference in real-time, since we had wi-fi available in the hall, but it was really a challenge. It’s hard to estimate how much bandwidth, and how many routers, to provide for so many tech-literate participants. So I ended up writing blog entries each evening, and then posting them during the day. This set off an inquiry into offline blogging tools (like MarsEdit and Ecto) which I use to this day. And an overview of blogging tools. And it continued my series I’m a Turtle about how I carry my “home” (computer) on my back(pack) everywhere I go (cyber-nomadics).

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