Gates' Future of Education Straight Out of '60s 203
theodp writes "Bill Gates really should have talked more with ex-Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie. While Khan Academy's new self-paced exercises, coach management options, and game mechanics (merit badges/points) prompted Gates to gush to the high-rollers at Salman Khan's TED Talk that they 'just got a glimpse of the future of education,' Ozzie's seen this movie before, having written similarly-featured PLATO courseware as a student at Illinois. In the '70s. On plasma terminals. With touch screens. Fifty years ago last Friday, 27-year-old EE PhD whiz kid Don Bitzer and partner Peter Braunfeld demonstrated the nascent PLATO system to assembled dignitaries at the 'President's Faculty Conference on Improving Our Educational Aims in the Sixties.' Hey, everything old is new again! Gates is hardly the only tech luminary who don't-know-much-about-PLATO-history — CS Prof Daniel Sleator felt compelled to school the Web's founders on PLATO in '94."
The truth (Score:5, Interesting)
The wheel of time turns, moving from one age to the next. History falls to myth, myth to legend, legend to half remembered tales spoken around the fire, and eventually, long after even that is forgotten, that age comes again.
KnownAbout != Importance (Score:4, Interesting)
The fact that it didn't really catch on as the answer to technology in education should tell us something about those who keep going back to this model for learning.
Bill Gates knows how to copy... (Score:2, Interesting)
Three orders of magnitude cost differential (Score:4, Interesting)
PLATO terminals were cool, but they cost about one human teacher annual salary [wikipedia.org] at the time, and needed a mainframe costing 100 human teacher years behind them, plus telecom links that were obscenely expensive by current standards. They were barely economically feasible only if you assumed large cost drops from volume production.
Comparing PLATO to modern internet distance learning is like comparing the Wright flyer to a modern jet aircraft.
Oh, stop it, Bill! (Score:5, Interesting)
Bill, you don't understand education. You didn't take the time to understand children, teenagers, sociology, social psychology, pedagogy, performance/theater, linguistics, or any other field necessary to comprehend what a teacher is and just spend your time and money looking for a silver bullet cure to any ailments.
First, Bill tried to give away millions to students to pay for their college education. Of course, it came in the form of competitive scholarships so those who were already destined to receive a bunch of money (because of a strong educational history and innate brilliance) simply got more. This made no change.
Then came the funding of techno-super schools. But they were neither in areas in need of improvement nor were the schools any cheaper (more expensive, obviously) to run. Another failure.
Bill, if you want to make a change, do this:
Create a system for the development of teachers. Not super-teachers or techno-teachers-- just teachers. At the moment there is no hub for potential teachers to go to that catalogs all the credential or master's programs. There's no easier step-by-step guide for the process in California. Everyone just quotes a vague order of things.
Also, if you don't want to help the creation of teachers (and hell, give grants to pay for their wages!), then try just funding the modest renovation of crap-hole schools and class rooms in low-income neighborhoods.
If you want to make a change, help the poor. It's that easy.
PLATO != Khan Academy (Score:2, Interesting)
"The fact that it didn't really catch on as the answer to technology in education should tell us something about those who keep going back to this model for learning."
This comment is, quite frankly, complete bullshit. It's like saying, "It was raining, so I used an umbrella, but then I was swept away by the tsunami. So what good are umbrellas?" I particularly liked the sweeping (and meaningless) reference to "technology in education." What the hell does that mean?
It is not an opinion that Khan Academy works, it is a demonstrable fact. And even though there are surface similarities between what was presented on a PLATO screen and what KA looks like, they couldn't be more different.
PLATO IV was approximately 1,000 plasma panel terminals connected to the biggest, baddest, MFing CPU any of us had ever seen. But if you couldn't get a seat in front of one of those terminals, PLATO didn't exist for you. We estimated that the average "student contact hour" of took 200 hours of design, programming and pedagogical work.
KA is millions upon millions of home computers (all of which are more powerful than the PLATO IV CPU) connected via the net to a Django-driven website that is literally changing and improving on a daily basis -- changes that are driven by teacher requests and student experiences. KA students aren't watching badly-done, rear-projected slides and listening to poorly recorded audio coming from of a Rube Goldberg, random-access audio device, they are choosing from amongst over 2,200 videos that are amazingly effective and available 24/7. Although almost all of the course presentations are currently done by Salman, that's beginning to change as they get translations into other languages, and new course material on subjects that he is not an expert in.
So don't compare PLATO to KA. It's as wrong-headed as trying to compare KRONOS to Linux 2.6.32.33-rc1. The KA feedback loop -- from developers > students/teachers > developers > and back again -- is as tight as any open source project I've ever seen. PLATO IV was the loftiest of closed cathedrals, whereas Khan Academy is a bazaar that is growing exponentially right before our eyes.
(And, yes, I do know what the hell I'm talking about because I've lived through all of this stuff. 10 of my 38 years in computing have been associated with CAI / CBT / WBT, starting with PLATO IV in 1973.)
Re:Solidarity with workers, not Wall Street parasi (Score:1, Interesting)
Teachers make crap money. Government workers make crap money.
Please define "crap money" because I don't think it means what you think it means. Do they make the millions some CEO's make? No. Do they make more then what their responsibilities are worth? Arguably, yes, way more. The other thing to remember is that there are a lot more Teachers and Government workers then there are CEO's.
It isn't your money .... You exchanged the money for your citizenship rights
No, that is not correct. I don't pay taxes in exchange for rights. I was born with inalienable rights and I, along with many others, constructed and now fund a government whose sole purpose is to protect those rights. The government is not separate from the people, it is made of the people, given power by the people, and it's whole purpose is to do the people's will. So any money the government has does not belong to it, it belongs to the people as a whole (rather than to the people individually). The idea that the money belongs to the government, is owed to the government came from politicians who would like to turn the government into something that it is not. This idea is false and should be derided, denied, and argued every time it is mentioned.