tl;dr: Running through the history of technology's effect on knowledge, we learn a little about formal institutions. I will also pretend you care enough about each link to click on all of them.
To characterize the current changes in education, some draw parallels between the invention of the internet and that of the Gutenberg bible/movable printing press, the enabler of mass-printed books. (Actually, an entire MIT class is based on the theory, but not without its critics.) The explosion of the sharing of knowledge after the Gutenberg bible is cited as the first step towards the democratization of knowledge--it allowed people outside academia to learn. Whether or not this parallel is fair, this medieval revolution planted the seed of the idea that education is a basic right, or at least can be.
Jump forward to the 20th century.
Strangely enough, these spotty inventions were symptoms of changes in the greater role of the university. The G.I. Bill, passed for WWII, subsidized war veterans' expenses in education (among other things). A huge influx of students flooded into universities, changing higher learning from a minority activity to general(ish) public's choice. From there, some scientists starting inviting prior outsiders into their classrooms, through TV-broadcast lessons, and some helped the flow of new, uninitiated students by automating their counselling process with PLATO (which spread to many campuses, and even to Africa). To show the ridiculous degree to which enrollment changed, have this excitingly colored graph:
Meanwhile, CS's foundling field full of intellectuals and mathematicians started formulating approaches to think about and teach CS. Perhaps the most important shift was towards Object-Oriented code--instead of sequentially giving the computer commands, programmers would organize and manipulate information in objects, similar to how humans conceptualize the world (other reasons). It also allowed graphics like windows and the mouse cursor to become common.
While a couple universities' and corperations' online courses got developed, things only started moving when the internet hit the general public with the release of Mosaic in 1993--an accessible browser which let laymen surf. I skip all the 'firsts' spread out between the '60s and '80s, such as the first online curriculum, college, or commercial interactive videodisc are the random first stones in the avalanche I'll delve into later.
TO BE CONTINUED
A last thought before I close:
The trend that universities start these new technologies is clear. It's interesting in the context of online education--would the same innovations happen in a digital sphere?
To characterize the current changes in education, some draw parallels between the invention of the internet and that of the Gutenberg bible/movable printing press, the enabler of mass-printed books. (Actually, an entire MIT class is based on the theory, but not without its critics.) The explosion of the sharing of knowledge after the Gutenberg bible is cited as the first step towards the democratization of knowledge--it allowed people outside academia to learn. Whether or not this parallel is fair, this medieval revolution planted the seed of the idea that education is a basic right, or at least can be.
Jump forward to the 20th century.
Predating the internet, a handful of attempts were made for spreading knowledge digitally. The first TV-broadcast classes, on first public broadcasting channel, were made by University of Houston in 1953 and followed by some other universities. An interesting program called PLATO from the University of Illinois helped council students through their academic career, helping establish e-mail, chat rooms, paint programs, emoticons, multi-player games, and the first online community. [More examples of early birds.].
Strangely enough, these spotty inventions were symptoms of changes in the greater role of the university. The G.I. Bill, passed for WWII, subsidized war veterans' expenses in education (among other things). A huge influx of students flooded into universities, changing higher learning from a minority activity to general(ish) public's choice. From there, some scientists starting inviting prior outsiders into their classrooms, through TV-broadcast lessons, and some helped the flow of new, uninitiated students by automating their counselling process with PLATO (which spread to many campuses, and even to Africa). To show the ridiculous degree to which enrollment changed, have this excitingly colored graph:
Meanwhile, CS's foundling field full of intellectuals and mathematicians started formulating approaches to think about and teach CS. Perhaps the most important shift was towards Object-Oriented code--instead of sequentially giving the computer commands, programmers would organize and manipulate information in objects, similar to how humans conceptualize the world (other reasons). It also allowed graphics like windows and the mouse cursor to become common.
While a couple universities' and corperations' online courses got developed, things only started moving when the internet hit the general public with the release of Mosaic in 1993--an accessible browser which let laymen surf. I skip all the 'firsts' spread out between the '60s and '80s, such as the first online curriculum, college, or commercial interactive videodisc are the random first stones in the avalanche I'll delve into later.
TO BE CONTINUED
A last thought before I close:
The trend that universities start these new technologies is clear. It's interesting in the context of online education--would the same innovations happen in a digital sphere?
How do these US trends compare to the trends elsewhere in the world?
ReplyDeleteI like the broad historical view and the many links to your sources. It might be good to give some indication of what they say, beyond just pointing. For example when you say “not without its critics” you could give a couple of sentences outlining the argument if it is relevant to your main ideas, or leave it out if not. It’s cute (maybe a bit too cute) to “pretend” that people will follow all the links, but it’s a better writing style to put enough content in to give the reader a sense of what is there and whether it is worth the diversion from what you are saying.
ReplyDeletePlato is an interesting example. It had very large ambitions and was a source of ideas and motivation for much that followed, including basic things like bitmapped displays. It is interesting to speculate about why it didn’t catch on in a larger sense. Obviously the initial dependence on large CDC computers limited the market, but there were ports to PC and web, which I’ve never heard much about.
Given that the teaching of CS is a basic issue here, it would be good to give a little more sense than just mentioning OOP. What was the role of FORTRAN (the first language I learned), Basic (which brought computing to a much larger audience on smaller machines), pedagogical languages like Pascal, etc. Or in another dimension, how did interactive time sharing change the teaching of CS (I started out in my academic computing by punching decks of cards and submitting them to the computer center).
…to be continued as you say