Transcripts For CSPAN2 Brian Dear The Friendly Orange Glow 2

CSPAN2 Brian Dear The Friendly Orange Glow February 22, 2018

[inaudible conversations] my name is brian dear and im on the stature of politics and prose. Like to thankk everyone for coming to the store. We have brian dear in his book the friendly orange glow the untold story of the before it turned over to the author himself i have a fewew housekeeping notes. Recording the presentation of our web site and it would be distracting. Speaking of the recording everyones questions during the questionandanswer portion so please come to the mic right over here on my last for tonight. Also if i could ask everyone to pull the pictures when the event is over that would be a big help help. Now to our guest brian dear. He is founded multiple companies companies. He has written for applications such as Educational Technology and the san diego research. His experience in the field computerbased education. Plato and its engineers shaped the early digital ages and influence with chart rooms instant messaging emoticons creating a culture the veryy beginning. The the friendly orange glow is an eyeopening historyg. Publishers weekly calls it a history offers a portrait managing creativity that the network row can unleash. I will now turn your attention to brian dear. [applause] c thank you everyone for coming. Im really honored to be here and thanks to politics and prose bookstore with which i have to say im a gigantic fan. Even though this is the first time ive been to the store ive beens watching the events in ts bookstore for at least two decades through booktv and cspan and i feel like i know the place back and forth but i recognize that spot anywhere for the different sections of the book. Its kind of appropriate that today is cyber monday because the plato computer about which im going to speak ran on a very large cyber and in the plato era cyber culture meant plato culture and it hadnt really been turned in a term that meant anything else but that. Remarkably as well talk about in more detail tonight this entire story has been almost kept classified in a way. So when no and we will goes into that in a bit. The way i organize this talk was to first think about the title of the book. Just to rehash that the friendly orange glow the untold story of the plato system and the don of cyber culture. There are basic way for themes in thatt title. What i found helps people sort of game a gradual understanding so we now know something a little bitt more about all this stuff is to actually imagine rearranging the title a little bit and thats how i will do tonights discussion. It will start with the plato system and then we will talk storywhy is it in untold and then well talk about the glow and whate that is. Then we will spend a lot of time on the don of cyber culture. Then we will have time for questions andrcrc answers. Lets dive right in and talk about the plato system. What is this thing . As we heard in the introduction the acronym stands for Program Logic or p automatic teaching operations which is a real tongue twister. The term was coined in the 1960s so this goes way, way, way back. Basically the idea, the vision of plato back in 1960 only a few years after mechanical machines were starting to be built at harvard and some other places to attempt to teach subjects to students particularly Grade School Kids and also some college students. A computer bec be much more efficient and more flexible. They were really three catalysts. Part of the book, there are three parts of the book. Part one is automatic teacher, part two is the phone that they had. And part three is getting to scale. Part one is really the origins of plato and what are the factors that led to it. And theres really three catalysts that i think you can sort of boil everything down to. One is bf skinner who was perhaps it will refute depends on how you look at him. At harvard university. Who had seen his daughters arithmetic class in 1953. This is how i open the book in this scene. He is sitting there and he just cannot believe what he sees. When he sees is to all of us, im absolutely sure, completely routine and boring and mundane. He sees the teacher walking up and down the aisles of a little classroom with 20 boys and girls. They are all in fourth grade in a math class. She is writing problems on the board and students are asked to solve the math problems and she is Walking Around checking peoples work. And pausing here and they are not part that sort of thing. And some students finish before others and that is what drives them crazy. He says this is inefficient. It is not as systematic as it could be. Not as easy as it could be. Every student should be able to finish whenever they want and not have to wait for the rest of the students. And you know, he then ran back to his office and within a few days he started building with cut out manila folders, a prototype of a teaching box you might call it. And within a few months, he had sort of perfected it, presented it at a major conference and it kind of operated like a primitive scrolling piano might. With little holes on a scroll paper and as he went through the answers were encoded on the paper and they question might appear in a tiny box saying what is 3 2 . And you have to move some sliders and indicate the answer is five. If you answered for you cannot move forward. If you answered six you cannot move forward. If you answered five, you pulled a spider right out of a slot machine i am sure. And then you can move to the next question which is, what is 4. 5 kenseth 4 5 or something . There was a gigantic leap. If you think about it for a moment it really takes a gigantic leap to go from a nurturing, human teacher to a box with scrolling paper inside. Which is supposed to be doing everything that a teacher can and should do to educate american children. Nationwide. And yet, everyone thought what a great idea. So another catalyst, we had the idea with skinner. Where did the money come from . The money came from in 1957 it was the soviet union launched sputnik. The first settlement to orbit the earth. When that happened, everyone freaked out. You can imagine if it happened today you would see scrolling at the bottom of cnn and fox and everything else. All day all of the pundits talking about it. That is all they talked about for months and months. The nation was either in a panic or near one and something had to be done clearly the soviets had beat us up because they are better educated, they know math and science better. But today we would call stem. Science, technology, engineering, math. And so the government very quickly formed nasa. It forms the Defense Department advanced Research Projects agency and if funded and created a massive new active legislation called the National Defense of education act. Which basically meant here is a whole bunch of money, who wants it . And lots of schools, lots of universities, lots of businesses wanted it and said we will try to improve education. And the third catalyst with the arrival and the imminent availability of Digital Computers which started really finally becoming commercially available in the late 50s and by 1961 plato started, we were starting to be all over the place which meant there were 20 of them instead of two of them. Within every month there were probably doubling. The university of illinois saw this as an opportunity to get into a major project that would be of great educational importance. They viewed this as a pure experiment. At least they had that skepticism. I dont think they have the pure unadulterated vision that skinner had. He really drank the koolaid and his approach was the way to go. The plato people, used the skinner ideas i think as a launchpad rather than as we are going to literally translate all of those ideas to the computer. So that is basically how things started arriving. Part one of the book was much more detailed about that. But basically all of this has been driven by a vision. If you look at any tech project where there is apple, google, facebook, snapchat. You know microsoft, apple, going all the way back in time every one of these Tech Companies has a vision. In basically every Technology Project starts with a vision. It usually is something that is a reaction to something and the attitude is, we can do a better, smarter, cheaper, faster. Something like that. Some combination or all of them. Plato was no different. Even that was 1960 was no different. And just like the jet airplane was a reaction to propeller airplanes, which is probably reaction to wilbur and orville wright. This pattern just continues. It is very predictable and that is something im very fascinated by. For example, you see that i would argue that facebook would never have existed without myspace. And myspace probably would not have existed without google had reason to exist without for being a reaction to say the inadequacies of other companies. So the plato vision was to build this responsive system. One of the rules of skinner was things have to be immediate. The feedback has to be immediate. He did not want to have a little child sitting there finishing up all of there problems and waiting for the rest of the class. So, with a computer, the idea was that is actually easy. Turned out it was not easy but it became one of the imperative underlying bulletproof mandate of the plato philosophy i guess. The computer plato philosophy. The project to make sure the system was insanely responsive. And as we will see, there were surprises that came with that that picked up all of part two of the book. Further, this vision really was about, we will build the greatest most flexible computer platform ever imagined that any teacher without any training will be able to sit down and compose whatever interactive lessons tutorials, simulations, games, educational games, whatever is appropriate for the students they will build and they will deploy to their students and all will be good. And this drove the vision with the passion and clarity i would argue of the apollo mission. All during the 60s. I think its interesting that kennedy gave his famous speech and 61. A few months after plaintiffs project started. And the optimism of that era. We can get thomas and when that surely we can build a computer that can basically teach any student in the United States. Self you may hear the phrase in the open a newspaper or magazine today would just browse around social media, youll hear about Educational Technology as a phrase. You hear schools talk about all the time, School Boards debate this all the time. Should we spend more millions on it . What is it . That kind of thing. The thing you need to understand is just plato era, corrective modern Educational Technology, the idea, the definition or thinking was that Educational Technology means technology that educates. And i think that is very different than a letter what is today. Which is more how do we spend millions to teach students how to tweet or use facebook in an educational setting for use Google Searches an email and all of the capabilities of google or whatever company is offering the service to the school district. In other words, it is basically information technology. It is it for schools and universities. And there isnt anywhere near as much teaching the system but back in the 60s and 70s and 80s, with the mission of plato and competitors plato, the idea was that we will teach with this system and the teacher doesnt have to do the teaching. It was a pretty revolutionary and controversial idea. Lets move onto the untold story. It is a very trite expression. There are thousands birth titles i have that is the subtitle. I was tempted not to include and just for the book friendly orange glow but i think it would end up in the novels section in the bookstore. Which might not have been a bad idea but in this case, even those it is an expression, i think it is about as accurate and bewilderingly accurate as you can imagine. Because there are no books, magazines, movies, documentaries, 60 minute segments, no programs that you have ever seen on plato anywhere. Theres never been a big wire cover story or even a back cover story or a middle of the story. According to Silicon Valley plato basically does exist and that is all well and good as it should be. So, this has created a challenge for an author who is writing a book about plato. Because usually when you try to do a history of something go to the sources and as the first step and you read what everybody else has written and the problem is no one else has written anything on plato. So i had to go around and it should be everybody. And it took about 30 years. And i did 7 Million Words and Interview Transcripts that attacked myself. That took a few years. It was the only way to get source material to go talk to the people and luckily they were still around. That gets to an interesting issue which you dont really have time to talk about tonight but there is a defense between history and journalism when youre trying to dig up a story. And some people describe me as a historian and i am certainly not that. I mean i do not have the training. I have read a lot of history but i think with plato story being so fresh and recent in the majority people still around, still alive, still on email and phones, this was more in keeping with the journalism profession or practices. So i approach this with a little bit of both. I did talk to everybody and try to figure out what the story was good that took a few years also. One thing to think about, the plato system was developed at the university of illinois in urbanachampaign. Which is a small town surrounded by many miles of corn. Literally. It is an island in green, you go there in the summer and youll see what im talking about. Five minutes in any direction and youre surrounded by cornfields. 10 feet high. What ive always been blown away by with plato is in fact the event university of illinois think it is arguable that there is another computer that is more famous than plato. It is from the movie 2001. And that is fictional. It was quote unquote from illinois if you watch the movie or read the book. But there are events where they celebrate the birth of how in urbana. And i went you know, to one of them. And im going around saying but what about plato . And they are like what . Who . The greek guy . He is down the hall in philosophy. So this is the kind of thing weve been up against in trying to document the history of leader. Read some things and skip around and keep things moving but i will try to adjust this untold story thing because it really is a huge factory in this book. It is kind of like this book was an effort to solve the mystery and the mystery was, what the heck is plato and why do the people who experienced it have this wideeyed vision like we saw the future before any of you guys. In the future being what everyone is doing now which is this all day long. We were all staring at the screen 40 years ago. Imagine discovering that a small group of people had invented a fully functioning jet airplane capable of flying Long Distances at hundreds of miles an hour, decades before the Wright Brothers cast their fragile craft into the wind for 12 seconds over North Carolina sand dunes and 1903. Imagine how such a discovery would disrupt the common understanding of history. The story of plato, a Computer System so far ahead of its time in perhaps the least nonmajor 20thcentury Technology Project may strike you as just as impossible at a story as the 19th century but plato really happened. It is great inventors hackers, geniuses and those that came it may make you wonder if it has made this author wonder, how could this have happened . Where are the books . The magazine articles, documentaries, Museum Displays that should have covered the story . Why has this done untold . Why are we only finding out about it now . We celebrate the rise of the internet, the world wide web, celebrate the accompaniments of xerox, a Research Center which in turn inspired apples macintosh computers. In environments we still use today. We celebrate with legions of start up companies and placed into the hands of millions now billions of people. Innovations have changed the world. Innovations people cannot imagine living without. We are living the very shocking future that warned us about 45 years ago. In the history of how we reach this feature has been researched, deciphered, studied, organized and disseminated far and wide long enough that the stories become legends, set in stone. Nerds, geeks and hackers are no longer indolent. Here they are sought after leaders. Many counted among the tens of thousands of recent millionaires and hundreds of billionaires. The lesson heroes names in the computer revolution quote unquote is long. There is an equally long list of unknown computer pioneers. The people whose stories fill pages of this book. The level to which plato, its people and its history have been ignored is extraordinary given not only have seminal the innovations were and how your Online Community flurries but have recently happened. Plato it is a Computer System with a culture. Physical and online. A community that form that is on with its own jargon. Customs and idioms. A cast thousands, a world familiar to us. Yet suddenly foreign. An entire area that clashes with the history of computing social media online communities, online games and online education. It is as if an advanced civilization that was scribed on earth dwelt among us both a wondrous technology and then disappeared as quietly as they had arrived. Leaving behind scraps of legend and artifacts only if you noticed. This book is the result of an effort to capture the history of the lost culture of innovation before it vanishes completely. Someone who had the Great Fortune to come of age and become digital. As it were within that very culture. Thereby having a chance to get to know some of the people there, their stories, revisions and amazing technologies. Technologies that we all now recognize and use. This book is also as much a biography of a vision as it is a story behind the people of plato. Every Technology Story whether it is about steam engin

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