by Brian Dear
Siegel’s team had a lot of concern that these valuable PLATO IV terminals and their keyboards and other equipment would be stolen, or disassembled, or otherwise destroyed. “There was great concern about security,” says Siegel, “because we knew that movie projectors or slide projectors or any kind of audiovisual equipment was usually taken apart or lost or stolen and broken in some way.” The concerns turned out to be unfounded. There was instead what Siegel calls a “most remarkable unexpected outcome.” In all the time that PLATO terminals were installed in the prisons, CERL never lost even a single plastic keycap on the keyboard. “Never, ever was there any damage to any of the equipment,” says Siegel. “There was more equipment damage to the classrooms at the University of Illinois, with bright college students, than in the prison environment. We heard from the inmates that the word went out really early that this was good stuff, and you don’t mess with it.”
Jim Knoke, one of CERL’s technicians charged with maintaining terminals at remote sites, found that while the hardware was not damaged per se, there was vandalism. Clever vandalism. “We weren’t in maximum security prisons, we were in minimum and medium, a little bit scary at first,” says Knoke. “We had to be very careful about tools.” The PCP lessons did not make use of the microfiche slide selector, so those mechanisms had all been removed from the terminals installed at prisons. What Knoke and company had not removed were the mirrors. Mirrors were prized possessions by inmates, not only to help an inmate see down the halls outside their cells, but to provide an inmate with shiv weapons when the mirror was broken into pieces. PLATO IV terminals had a mirror designed to reflect the projected image from a microfiche slide into and through the back of the plasma display, so a student would see the image behind any overlaid text and graphics. “Somehow these guys would get the mirrors out, they would steal them,” says Knoke. “We did have to lock down things, padlock them, so they couldn’t take them apart.”
The inmates discovered not only the advantages of Self-Pacing and Immediate Feedback, but the fact that they were free—in the middle of a prison where there is no freedom or privacy to speak of—to learn, privately, at their own pace, and without fear of ridicule or threats of bodily harm or worse. The computer provided a way to learn that they were not used to. No tough-guy act was required, nor would PLATO have even known how tough a guy you were. You could answer a question and be told you were wrong and why you were wrong, and it was okay. You could answer a question and be told you were right, and that was okay too. PLATO provided a safe space for learning.
Siegel wanted his PCP courseware developers to visit the prisons to better understand who they were creating courseware for. “I actually took them to prison sites,” he says, “where they could sit down and see the look on an inmate’s face as the system crashed or as a lesson crashed, and to see the student say, ‘Hey, I trusted this thing and now I’m not going to trust it anymore.’ For some of these people it was the last time they were going to take a risk on learning, on education. It had great impact on the programmers.” One of those programmers was Tim Halvorsen. “That experience still stands out in my mind,” says Halvorsen. “We’d show up, and I’m talking machine guns on the towers…apparently somebody had just stabbed somebody a couple hours before, and there was a lockup….We’d be installing the software and setting up the terminals…and I talked to this one person who was in the lab there doing work and he’d say, he’d just blurt out, ‘Hi there, my name’s so and so, I’ve killed somebody.’ That was his introduction. And I’d just be looking at him like, holy mackerel.”
The original idea of PCP was to develop some courseware for inmates and then deploy it at a handful of Illinois prisons. The Department of Justice funding was expected to last only a few years. It had originally come from the administrations of Nixon and Gerald Ford. When Jimmy Carter was elected, the Democrats looked around for funding to cut, and the PCP project was put on the chopping block. “They saw these kinds of projects as pet projects of the Republican administration,” says Siegel, “and so there was a freeze on all of these projects. An indiscriminate freeze, I mean they didn’t look at ‘Is this a good project or a bad project’—it was a Republican project: bad idea. And we were shut down.” The state of Illinois sued the government in federal court, but despite testimony that wowed the judge on the success that PCP had made, they lost. Things might have ended right then, but there was another surprise. “The state government was so impressed with what we had done,” says Siegel, “and the success that we had with the inmates, the effect that it had, that they decided after they lost the lawsuit…they said, ‘We will fully support the project 100 percent out of state funds.’ And from that point on, until the project ended, which was about ’87–’88, it was fully funded by the state of Illinois, usually at around two hundred thousand or so dollars a year. So it was quite a bit of investment on the part of the state, and I think a testimony to [its] success.”
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When asked for an example of a successful use of PLATO with kids during the 1970s, Priscilla Corielle immediately recalled one story she termed a “remarkable success.” “It was with a group of kids that were affectionately by their caretakers called ‘the weird kids.’ This was a state-run residential facility for children with, oh goodness, emotional, cognitive, behavioral, other deep, deep problems, that didn’t fall into commonly accepted categories at the time, and we’re talking again forty years ago, there might have been autistic kids there—who knows what these poor little kids were dealing with.”
The people who ran this facility were interested in PLATO, and after some discussions with CERL, a PLATO IV terminal was installed there. Corielle had developed lessons as part of the elementary reading program, and went out to see how the kids would perform. These were kids who, Corielle says, “had such a terrible time, for a very good reason in many cases, interacting with humans. For example, some of these kids had been abused by their parents in ways that I can’t even repeat. So these were really terribly, terribly damaged little people. They were adorable and sweet and lovable, but boy they had been clobbered. So, anyway, there was one little girl that was dealing with the very simple PLATO reading activity. It involves two little girls of, you know, cartoonish characters on the screen: one of the girls is happy, one of the girls is sad, and I think the child was supposed to touch the word ‘sad’ and that would make the word go up into the sentence and fill it in and it would match the picture. Well, this little girl not only touched it, touched the word correctly, but she said, ‘The girl is sad.’ She uttered those words.”
This little girl had been diagnosed as aphasic, with Down’s syndrome. The institution believed she was unable to speak. Doctors had recommended to the family that she be institutionalized. But in front of a PLATO terminal, she spoke. “The family was not a cruel or abandoning family,” says Corielle, “they did visit this little person, this little girl, from time to time. But basically the upshot was, she learned the culture of being a Down’s syndrome kid, I mean, severely Down’s syndrome—she never had models of people talking.”
Corielle and her colleagues told the teachers at the residential facility that this little girl was not aphasic. “They said, ‘Oh, yeah, she’ll never talk,’ ” says Corielle. “And we showed them that she could talk. It turned out that the child was then tested, it turned out that she had somewhat above-average intelligence and that she did not belong where she was. I’m not sure if the family took her back permanently, I know there were increased visits. But…it had an upside in measure potential that was recognized and then cultivated. It had a downside in that acquiring language led her to understand what had happened to her. And that was an emotional blow to the child. I don’t know the end of the story. I trust the end of the story is a happy end.”
Part II
THE FUN THEY HAD
Now we have the Screen, and it rules.
Our kids are perma-plugged into its promise, admiring all its jewels.
�
��Kate Tempest
Orange dots beckon. They welcome with temptation, power, and promise. All 262,000 of them reach out with their unearthly glow.
—P. Gregory Springer
The computer display will be mankind’s new home.
—Ted Nelson
11
Impeachment
There is a creek, Boneyard is its name, that runs west to east across the University of Illinois campus, through the Engineering Quad, just south of CERL. It acts as a natural hyphen connecting the two towns of Champaign and Urbana. For years, mere mention of Boneyard to locals triggered strong responses. Hardly a creek, they would tell you: a notorious, no-good, toxic trickle of stinky sewage, more like. Says Marc Andreessen, in the early 1990s a UI undergrad creating the Mosaic web browser, and now a very successful venture capitalist, “I was always worried it was generating invisible fumes that were going to kill me.”
The Boneyard, environmentalists insisted, played a key role as an important Champaign County watershed. Past Urbana, it flowed east into one of numerous tributaries that eventually fed into the Wabash River, which in turn dumped into the Ohio River on its way to the mighty Mississippi. That all may be, Boneyard detractors would respond, but on too many days the Boneyard smelled less like a watershed and more like an outhouse. The creek might once perhaps have been pleasant to look at, even safe to drink from, back when Chief Shemauger of the Pottawatomie Indian tribe was born, in the 1700s, so the story goes, under a hickory tree that grew alongside the Boneyard’s banks. Then again, less idyllic stories tell of Indians hanging their dead in tree branches directly above the creek, so the bones would eventually fall into the creek and be washed clean and carried downstream. (More recent campus wags say the creek got its name from the bones of engineering majors who flunked out of UI’s challenging undergraduate curriculum.)
With the 1820s arrival of white settlers and the construction of cabins and buildings, the creek entered a new era, one marked by a prolonged battle between man and nature. In time, the outposts of Champaign and Urbana became villages, and with the eventual arrival of the railroad, the villages grew to be intertwined towns. The University of Illinois opened in 1867. More than a century of population growth and the accompanying boom in houses, streets, shops, businesses, parks, and campus buildings gradually obliterated the natural banks of Boneyard Creek. The banks would be replaced by brick and concrete retaining walls, or tunnels, or bridges, or sometimes simply chain-link fences with barbed wire. As the towns grew, so grew the creek’s troubles with pollution, odors, rodents, and, in the warmer months, mosquitoes. Boneyard would become an eyesore and an open sewer. For most of the year, the creek never got more than a foot deep, except during those magnificent Midwestern thunderstorms, when the pounding rain drove the creek to rise quickly and flood parts of town, especially around the university campus. For decades environmentalists argued that it was a key component of the Illinois ecology and advocated its restoration, while at the same time others pushed to shut the creek down, fill it up with dirt, and pave it over once and for all. In 2000, some $25 million in public funds were finally put to use: a large section of the creek was cleaned up and diverted underground. In more recent years, additional sections of the creek have been cleaned up and the surrounding landscape beautified, including where it crosses the engineering campus. But this is one ornery creek that never stops finding ways to drive the public, and the city legislators, crazy. Open a newspaper in Champaign-Urbana even today and there’s a good chance of finding yet another story about whether or not to continue “improving” the creek.
Boneyard became a hot topic in PLATO circles in 1970. Two University of Illinois graduate students, Stuart Umpleby and Valarie Lamont, were looking for ways to push the PLATO III system beyond mere education. Lamont had arrived at the university in 1968, to pursue a doctorate in political science. Umpleby already had a bachelor’s in mechanical engineering and a master’s in political science at UI, and was in 1969 pursuing a PhD in communications. During his undergraduate years he’d become something of a protégé of Dr. Charles Osgood’s, a psychology professor widely known for his invention of the “semantic differential” (a method of evaluating a person’s subjective understanding of the connotative meanings of words, using pairs of bipolar adjectives like “good-bad,” “soft-hard,” and “valuable-worthless”). Outside of work, Osgood actively opposed the Vietnam War, as did Umpleby, who managed to push Osgood and other university figures to write letters to the military authorities, citing Umpleby’s valuable and ongoing contributions, and requesting an “occupational deferment” from the Selective Service System so Umpleby might avoid being drafted and sent to Vietnam.
Computers intrigued Osgood, and he advocated the discussion and exploration of alternative futures where war had no place. He thought there might be ways to use a computer to aid in this exploration. That led him and Umpleby to PLATO, where they tested out some of their ideas. One was a game on PLATO III called Delphi. “Delphi enables individuals to shape—within limits—future social and scientific developments,” a press release at the time announced. “The future shaped by the ‘explorer,’ or player, is determined partly by his own subjective ‘investments,’ partly by the relationships between developments and partly by the conditional probabilities of events happening by the year 2000. These last two factors are built into the computer program.” The game was designed to get people to think about the future, and how going down one path to develop a new technology or implement some social policy might impact other outcomes.
In 1970, Umpleby encouraged Lamont to check out PLATO as well. They decided to create a program to raise people’s awareness about Boneyard Creek. What would happen, they wondered, if a program were written on PLATO and presented to local community members—none of them technical—enabling them to explore multiple possible scenarios for dealing with Boneyard? The program would present the scenarios to help the community members in their decision-making process. Lamont and Umpleby would evaluate how well or poorly the program did, and draw conclusions regarding the potential for future computer applications involving community issues and decision making at the local level. It was the kind of project that today gets launched on the World Wide Web every hour across the world by local community, activist, and political groups, to educate the public, advocate a certain position, and, if all goes well, get people to change their minds (and maybe donate money in support). That Umpleby and Lamont were exploring using a computer network to do this in 1970, decades before the Web even existed, speaks to their prescience, but as pioneers in technology have so often found, their naïveté combined with being first did not translate to success.
Lamont taught herself the rudiments of TUTOR programming and created a lesson called Creek. Creek may be the first case of a “non-lesson lesson” on PLATO, in that it was not a drill and practice, simulation, or interactive tutorial presentation; rather, it was not unlike an online survey or series of informational web pages today. Its intended audience was not students at all, but the local public, particularly local politicians, city administrators, and environmental activists. From one perspective, Creek was like an early “Electronic Town Hall,” a concept that would itself become a buzzword in another ten, twenty years. Creek resembled a very simple website: throw together a bunch of informational pages online, some with text, some with text and photos, and toss in some questions and branching at the end of the sequence. Behind the scenes, collect some data and run analytics on how people responded and what paths they took through the program. If all went well, the user and the creators of Creek would both learn something (this was Bitzer’s “computer-based education,” after all). Lamont and Umpleby hoped users would read about the Boneyard and its pollution, see photos of it, get a summary of the environmental issues surrounding it, and then make a decision about the best possible environmental and community outcomes for the creek. Lamont summarized the project in a newsletter she and Umpleby put out during this time:
One of the most important activities of those concerned with the future has been an attempt to generate public interest and involvement in future-oriented activities. The common methods used have been conferences, travelling lecturers, the promotion of community study groups, and the introduction of future courses in colleges and universities. In addition, there are numerous magazines, newsletters, and journals devoted to articles on the future.
Despite sincere efforts, the vast majority of the population remains outside the realm of future-oriented thinking except possibly as spectators. In order to more actively involve large segments of the population in considering and originating alternatives, it may be necessary to invent new communications media or apply existing technology in innovative ways. There are a number of new communication technologies now coming onto the scene—cable television, communications satellites, video cassettes, and the teaching computer—which offer unique opportunities. The most important of these technologies may well be those which present the possibility of establishing direct, two-way communication with the populace.
“It was really a different twist on the programs that were being developed from an educational standpoint,” says Lamont, “because basically what Stuart and I were saying was that this technology had applications beyond traditionally designed education.”
