Computer Lessons – Creatures of Thought

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In memory of Clement J. McDonald, Junior, 1940-2026<br>Beloved husband, loving father, incomparable colleague and generous mentor

A sudden push from the industry,<br>A sudden grant in the fall,<br>By three R's left unguarded<br>They have entered our study hall.

They climb into the curriculum,<br>O’er plans, objectives, and goals,<br>If I try to escape, they surround me,<br>With carrels, consultants, and polls.

They almost devour me with data,<br>Hard copy is ever replete,<br>But it beats chalk dust and dittos[1],<br>And the students think that it’s neat

-- from “The Computer Hour,” Robert C. Snider [https://archive.org/details/nea-lttr-dpt-ed.-don-senese-nat-tech-conf.-best-8-mar-1982].

Masters or Subjects?

The belief that computers would revolutionize education took root long before the microcomputer era; it had spread rapidly across American universities in the 1960s. The political and technical moment were both ripe: the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957 and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs both catalyzed massive new flows of federal money into education, and into educational research in particular. Meanwhile, time-sharing, which allowed multiple users to simultaneously access a single large, expensive computer, made it conceivable to teach whole classrooms of students at once by computer (though this was still very expensive, given the price of computers at the time).

A student studies a geometry lesson on a PLATO terminal [From Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, “A Little History of e-Learning” (2021)]

Two of the earliest time-sharing systems—the Dartmouth Time Sharing System (DTSS) at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, and the PLATO system at the University of Illinois—were created specially for educational purposes, and both were backed by government grants, from the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and National Science Foundation (NSF), respectively—PLATO would later get NSF money as wel). (We have already encountered both of these systems in other contexts: DTSS as the origin of the BASIC computer language, and PLATO as a source of inspiration for some early microcomputer games.)[2]

The educational rationales that motivated PLATO and DTSS were very different, however. PLATO came out of the tradition of “teaching machines”: mechanical or electro-mechanical devices that presented a sequence of instructional material to the student, allowing them to advance to the next item only after a correct answer. The promoters of teaching machines (most prominently, Sidney Pressey in the 1920s and 1930s and B.F. Skinner in the 1950s and 1960s), promised to bring the industrial revolution to education by automating course material. But unlike the mass-produced homogeneity of industrial products, teaching machines would offer personalized instruction that would move as fast or slow as a given student required, giving each the equivalent of a private tutor. The reach of the teaching machine, however, exceeded its grasp: as one critic put it, despite their revolutionary ambitions, they were little more than "expensive page turners."[3]

An electronic computer could do far more than Pressey and Skinner’s simple machines, however, and the field of computer-aided instruction (CAI) that emerged in the early 1960s aimed to tap into that flexibility to realize the promise of the teaching machine. PLATO (one of those absurd backronyms, Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations) was the most long-lasting and best known computer system to emerge from the CAI movement. It began as a simple computerized teaching machine that presented a series of slides to students. But its later iterations used graphical terminals, could move arbitrarily through instructional material, without having to follow a pre-set linear sequence, and could present interactive materials (such as a simulated, open-ended chemistry lab) that were impractical to recreate on paper.

Despite its much greater power, the sales pitch for PLATO was the same as that for the teaching machines that preceded it: to offer each child automatic and individually-paced instruction, accelerating their absorption of the time-honored curriculum of math, reading, science, and so forth. The Cold War competition with the Soviet Union in this post-Sputnik moment fused with Great Society concerns about failing urban schools to give a sense of urgency to the search for more efficient and effective teaching methods, and also justified the large grants required to fund the use of expensive computer time by undergraduates or even high school students.[4]

The premise of the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System, on the other hand, was that students would use computers to learn about computers. As we have already mentioned, DTSS was created by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz as a metaphorical open-stack library for computing, and they introduced the BASIC computer language to make computer programming accessible to every undergraduate. Kemeny, head...