The Friendly Orange Glow

by Brian Dear

  Over the years the gurus of educational technology have spun out buzzword after buzzword: computer-aided instruction; computer-assisted learning; electronic learning; e-learning; online learning; digital learning; computer-based training; Web-based training; personalized learning. The game seemed to be, if you can get academia, get industry, and ultimately get the media and the public, to adopt your buzzword, you win. (What you win at that point is anyone’s guess. In reality the constant coinage of new buzzwords probably does no one any good, particularly the confused media and public.)

  Thus the situation has continued unabated since the 1960s. Today we have MOOCs (massive open online courses), e-learning, online learning, blended learning, flipped classrooms, learning management systems, and so on. The buzzword game is still in effect, and the media and the public are no better off understanding what’s what now than they were fifty years ago.

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  Corporations like Systems Development Corporation, RCA, General Electric, and IBM all had CAI projects under way by the mid-1960s. University labs continued to pop up around the country and the world experimenting with their own versions of CAI/CBE, either using whatever computer system was around, leasing time on someone else’s time-sharing system, or, less frequently, attempting to design and build their own system from scratch.

  All these projects needed money, and there was only so much to go around. Corporations usually could rely on their own sources of funding, but academic labs were always looking for money. Behind every successful lab were one or more “money machines,” like Suppes and Alpert, well connected with foundations and government agencies.

  Then in 1967 it appeared that the federal government was going to hand out some more money. “A report by the National Academy of Sciences, ‘Digital Computer Needs in Universities and Colleges,’ made a strong case for universities having access to computers for research, but said little about education,” says Andrew Molnar, who spent four years at the U.S. Office of Education before joining the National Science Foundation. “In 1967, the President’s Science Advisory Committee commissioned a study of computers in higher education. John Pierce from Bell Labs was the chairman and held extensive hearings. They concluded that an undergraduate college education without adequate computing was as deficient as an undergraduate education would be without an adequate library. They also felt there was value in using computers for pre-college education. These recommendations had a significant impact on educators. I think it was a trigger for the involvement of the National Science Foundation. The most significant event occurred when President Lyndon Johnson in his February 28, 1967, speech directed the National Science Foundation to work with the U.S. Office of Education to establish an experimental program to develop the potential of computers in education. In July of 1967, in response to the directive, NSF created the Office of Computing Activities to provide federal leadership in the use of computers for research and education. I joined after that.”

  Alpert reached out to Molnar. PLATO III was moving along, PLATO IV was on the drawing board, the plasma panel display was progressing well, the TUTOR language had been invented, boosting lesson author productivity by orders of magnitude. PLATO had momentum. It was time for the NSF to pitch in and support the early research and development of Bitzer’s enormously ambitious PLATO IV. The commonly bounced around number in the mid- to late 1960s to describe the scale of PLATO IV was 4,096 terminals. PLATO IV would run on some sort of supercomputer mainframe costing millions of dollars, and drive 4,096 terminals in a massive demonstration project that would not only put PLATO on the map but also awaken the nation to the rosy potential of CBE.

  NSF duly began doling out funds. CERL got $475,000 in early 1968. Seymour Papert got some to work on the LOGO computing environment for children. John Kemeny and Tom Kurtz at Dartmouth received support for their BASIC programming language. Molnar calls this period from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s “the golden age of education.”

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  NSF was reluctant to fund science education, says Andrew Molnar. But NSF’s Office of Computing Activities found a way to do it, by funding the development of computer-based education systems—a sort of trickle-down approach whereby getting computers in the hands of educators would lead to innovative applications related to science, and, inevitably, into the hands and minds of learners in the classroom. The National Science Board, which governed NSF, was not sold on the idea. To help make the sell, at some point around 1970, NSF invited Dan Alpert and Donald Bitzer to come to Washington and make presentations and demo PLATO to the board. This was the standard dog-and-pony show, a live demo using phone lines back to Urbana, with a trusty recorded tape and a tape player at the ready should the phone lines not work (they could plug the tape recorder audio output into the phone setup, and the terminal would be fooled into thinking it was receiving displays from CERL when in fact they were recorded from a previous demo).

  CERL engineering technicians Jim Knoke and Ray Trogdon had been tasked with taking one of OI’s four-inch prototype plasma panels and incorporating it into a full-size plywood mockup of the PLATO IV terminal for the demo. The result was a big blue plywood box with a tiny square screen front and center, with a lid on the top of the box you could open, but you had to be careful fiddling about inside. “We called it the ‘Possum Trap,’ ” says Knoke. Inside the lid was a crude but functional microfiche slide mechanism, but it was possible to get your hands caught in it if you weren’t careful. The technicians carefully set up the big blue clunky Possum Trap terminal on a table, set all the cables, and got the live telephone connection back to CERL up and running. “Everything worked fine during the test, and then just as we were to make the presentation, just before, we had difficulty with the phone line,” says Knoke. Then the plasma display didn’t light. Moments before the demo was about to start. The electronics inside the terminal were so extremely delicate that Knoke had doubts the Possum Trap would survive the trip out to Washington, but it had made it, and Knoke and the other technicians had taken great care to gently set everything up. And now it was not working, seconds before Bitzer was about to start.

  The “Possum Trap” terminal in storage in 2003 Credit 22

  Bitzer assessed the situation and then did what any leader of a technology project does when he is about to go on with a demonstration that will determine whether his project gets funding from the United States government or not. He took his hand and slammed the side of the Possum Trap hard. “My heart went into my throat,” says Knoke, “when he slammed the side of the box, which, again, was so sensitive. But by some miracle, the whole thing lit up with text on the screen and the phone line came through and we were ready for the demonstration.”

  Bitzer proceeded with his usual demo to the gathered dignitaries, but he wasn’t winning over the board. “Initially the board was extremely skeptical,” Molnar says, “since most were unfamiliar with the developments in instructional uses of computers.” Luckily for Alpert and Bitzer, they’d brought along in their PLATO entourage chemistry professor Stan Smith, who’d developed a reputation at the University of Illinois as one of the top designers and implementers of creative uses of PLATO. Smith was the ace up their sleeve, and it helped further, for this meeting, that one of the NSF brass had a chemistry background. “Stan Smith,” says Molnar, “was an outstanding chemist, a marvelous teacher.” Rather than just do a canned demo, he threw down a challenge to the board. “Tell me anything you find hard to teach in chemistry,” he said. The board responded with a chemistry problem. Smith duly typed the problem into the PLATO lesson he was running. Chemical symbols came up on the screen and he solved the problem.

  The board was astounded. “They did not believe this could be done,” says Molnar.

  The Stan Smith demo did the job and won the National Science Board over. Bitzer would go on to demo PLATO to members of Congress, which approved the NSF funding. “But [they] did not provide any extra money,” Molnar says. “Therefore, we had to take the funds o
ut of existing programs.” Luckily, some of the NSDEM money left over from the Johnson administration was available. It certainly was not going to come from the incoming Nixon administration.

  There were more NSF demos leading up to the money being released to CERL in 1972. At one, a large CERL entourage, including Bruce Sherwood, Stan Smith, and Paul Tenczar, came out to Washington again, with Bitzer leading the demo not just with a new PLATO IV terminal but also with a new, freestanding random-access audio device attached. Recalls John Risken, who led CERL’s project to develop elementary reading lessons, “They all went down and did this demonstration, and of course one of the things they were demonstrating is the random-access audio device, which was pretty impressive really, and so Bitzer was up there onstage, demonstrating the touch panel and the random-access audio device, and the terminal was sitting on a table that had a skirt around it. And the audio device was sitting up there on top of the table along with the terminal, mind you, this is a presentation to a multimillion-dollar funder, and yet, people were comfortable enough with Bitzer and with Bitzer’s personality that after Bitzer finished the audio demonstration, and turned around to talk to the people from the stage, Tenczar had set things up so that about five minutes later the audio device would fire off one more message. While Bitzer was talking, suddenly from under the table came this ‘Don, can I come out from under the table now?’ Throwing the actuality of the whole audio device into doubt. And they knew him, people knew him well enough to know that he would think that was funny rather than become outraged and defensive and everything else.”

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  Erik McWilliams was tall with a Scandinavian look about him and had a background in math and computing at Cornell University, where he’d administered the university’s Office of Computing Services toward the end of the 1960s. He’d done similar work at the University of Chicago back in the mid-1960s, where he got his master’s degree. After working at Cornell for a while, he took a one-year rotating leave of absence to join the National Science Foundation’s Computer Applications in Research program, whose mission was to stimulate the use of computers in scientific disciplines like math, physics, and chemistry. After about six months, Arthur Melmed, who worked at another division in NSF, approached him regarding a program he was setting up to fund two oddly named computer education projects: one called PLATO and one called TICCET, for Time-shared Interactive Computer-Controlled Educational Television.

  McWilliams had attended one of the numerous Alpert and Bitzer dog-and-pony shows in Washington. Bitzer demonstrated PLATO III using a live PLATO III terminal connected back to Urbana, as well as the Possum Trap. McWilliams immediately recognized one of the members of the PLATO entourage at the demo: Bruce Sherwood. Sherwood had been working on his degree in physics at the University of Chicago when McWilliams was there, and both of them knew each other from working at the university computer center. Sherwood recognized McWilliams as well. They talked, got reacquainted, and kept in touch afterward.

  Meanwhile, Melmed began talking seriously about PLATO and TICCET, and eventually began including McWilliams in the planning meetings. Ken Stetten, who worked across the Potomac in Northern Virginia at MITRE Corporation, came in for a visit to brief NSF about TICCET, which would eventually be slightly renamed as TICCIT (the second “I” standing for “Information”). “I never worked in the television medium much, so that was my first introduction to that approach,” says McWilliams. “And it sounded interesting. I mean, the times were quite different: if you look at it in hindsight, it probably looks a trifle naive to think that you could actually gin something up for ten or twelve million and really get somewhere. But those were different times. Things were much more optimistic, it was more a period of experimentation, particularly in education.”

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  The stories of TICCIT and PLATO intertwine, and how they intertwine sheds useful light on both projects. A good place to start is with M. David Merrill. He attended Brigham Young University (BYU) in Utah as an undergraduate with dreams of becoming an electrical engineer. A Mormon, he began at twenty to serve as a missionary for two years. “I was assigned to work in Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan,” he says. “We went from door to door telling folk about our church. I was impressed at this time that our teaching was ineffective. I began to think about better ways that we could teach.”

  His interest in education eventually made him abandon his pursuit of an engineering degree. In time he would enroll in the University of Illinois’ doctoral program in education, studying under Larry Stolurow, creator of SOCRATES. Stolurow’s graduate program was designed to expose the students to theories of learning and instruction and hopefully trigger the students to synthesize these ideas into new theories. Merrill completed his PhD at the University of Illinois in 1964, becoming familiar with both PLATO and SOCRATES during his time there.

  A year later Merrill had secured a visiting professorship at Stanford University—Suppes and Atkinson territory. “I did not work with Pat Suppes. However, I wanted to and was really frustrated that I didn’t get to,” says Merrill. Though he got an offer to stay at Stanford, he chose to go to the University of Texas at Austin to work with C. Victor Bunderson, who led a CAI lab. Merrill eventually landed at Brigham Young University. Bunderson wanted Merrill to join his lab, but soon Merrill wanted Bunderson to join BYU. Thus began a tug-of-war for several years. Bunderson would continue building up his CAI lab at the University of Texas, acquiring an IBM 1500 system along the way.

  At one point Merrill and Bunderson found themselves at a conference on the East Coast. Bunderson told him about his project that NSF was funding. It involved developing an entire remedial English and math curriculum at the junior college level, and described how the system was going to work. The scale of the project was bigger than Bunderson had anticipated, and he was concerned that his Texas lab didn’t have enough people to do the work. Merrill offered his BYU team as additional help, and Bunderson accepted. That led them to travel to Washington, to present to NSF and MITRE. Merrill went home with a large amount of the initial contract to do the remedial courseware development, “without ever having written a lick of a proposal,” Merrill says. It was something of a coup back at BYU.

  Merrill had one more hurdle to overcome. With this new TICCIT project, Bunderson’s Texas lab stood to receive substantial federal funding and visibility in the field. Merrill still wanted Bunderson to move himself and his lab up to BYU. Merrill let NSF know that BYU had a standing, lucrative offer to Bunderson for a full professorship at BYU. Then NSF decided to reduce the planned budget for TICCIT such that two university labs were one too many. The solution was to consolidate everything at BYU.

  Merrill’s team at BYU worked in an abandoned three-story home economics building on the lower campus of the university. They had the entire building to themselves. They used one of the classrooms as a conference room, and met there regularly to discuss plans and share ideas.

  There were a few things that Merrill’s team at BYU needed badly to make progress. Specifications, for one. They kept asking Bunderson for specs, and specs were slow in coming. “What does it look like? What does the screen look like? What does the keyboard look like?” Merrill had assumed all those things had been decided already. They hadn’t been. “I had authors that were writing instructional materials for a system that we don’t even know what it looks like. We don’t know what it can do, we don’t have any of the characteristics.”

  All Merrill had was an early paper on learner control by Bunderson and Steve Fine, a computer scientist who worked for Bunderson at the Texas lab. Fine had submitted a paper to NSF in May 1972 entitled “Learner Control: Commands for Computer-Assisted Instruction Systems.” “Those were very vague ideas, they certainly weren’t implementation,” says Merrill. “They didn’t talk about screen design or any other thing. They talked about ‘macros,’ they talked about the whole notion of a ‘discovery system,’ where students would choose from a menu which kind of system and then be kin
d of locked into that.” Merrill and company weren’t satisfied that this went far enough. His math and English authors were “going crazy,” he says. “We were telling them general instructional design principles and they had no idea what they were designing.”

  The BYU team’s debates on learner control ultimately resulted in taking the TICCIT system on a path the complete opposite of PLATO. Whereas PLATO was open, flexible, and devoid of any particular instructional theory limiting lesson authors to developing lessons that followed a particular design, TICCIT would reflect a single instructional theory burned not only into the software, but into the hardware as well, right in the keyboard with its special keys for RULE, EXAMPLE, PRACTICE.

  The culture of the TICCIT lab at BYU could not have been more different than CERL. For one thing, staff meetings were far more formal affairs, always starting with a prayer. Meticulous minutes were kept, typed up in memos, and filed away. BYU was largely instructional designers and educational psychologists, with few engineers, as MITRE was two thousand miles away. This meant there were no impromptu, interdisciplinary hallway conversations allowing cross-fertilization of ideas to take place, whereas at CERL, interdisciplinary cross-fertilization was the norm.

  In 1971, just as the TICCIT and PLATO camps were drafting their respective proposals to NSF, Ken Stetten of MITRE Corporation disseminated a position paper comparing TICCIT and PLATO that sent CERL into conniptions. In the paper he argued that PLATO IV’s design was fatally flawed and could never work. CERL, he asserted, had not done modeling simulations using Stetten’s favored modeling tool, a tool that would have provided insight into how much memory and how many processors would be needed to handle all of the input and output and processing of the PLATO IV system. On the other hand, MITRE, Stetten argued, had done careful analysis and modeling and they were confident their numbers were correct and that TICCIT would perform well. “We felt badly about this,” says Bruce Sherwood, “in part because there had been a tremendous amount of actual modeling of the system using PLATO III. It wasn’t a simulation, it was actually put together. And reaction times and keystroke rates and output rates and so on had been measured. There had been a lot of modeling based on real data, and the TICCIT group didn’t actually have any data at all.”