Looking at PLATO’s past to build a better future
Musings on the first computerized teaching machine and its influence on education technology
In 1957, the Soviet Union surprised the world with the successful launching of the Sputnik I satellite into space. President Eisenhower reacted to this Cold War challenge by making the teaching of science and mathematics instrumental to regaining American leadership, leading to renewed interest in computer-based education. PLATO is one of those projects spawned as a result of this renewed interest.
Created in the 1960s at the University of Illinois, PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations) is the first generalized computer-assisted teaching machine.
As a technology, PLATO was way ahead of its time, most notably with its invention of the flat-screen plasma display as well as pioneering online forums and message boards, email, chat rooms, instant messaging, remote screen sharing, and multiplayer games two decades before the World Wide Web was mainstream.
While it was initially built as a teaching machine, PLATO grew to become more than that. To most historians, PLATO's legacy lies in its influence on online communities, not on education. At a certain point, PLATO could be seen as a distraction to plenty of students. Here’s what the director of the distance-learning program at Florida State University has to say about PLATO:
The gaming, the Notes, and the real-time flirting made PLATO highly addictive, occasionally interfering with its role as an aid to education, says Owen Gaede, now the director of the distance learning program at Florida State University. "Many graduate students," Gaede reflects, "failed to complete their graduate program because of Empire [a popular game created by users in PLATO]."
If you look into the history of computers in education, there’s a good chance you won’t see PLATO mentioned in the note. Reflecting on its failure could clue us in on potential reasons for its relative obscurity.
What PLATO failed to accomplish
Failure to commercialize
Despite being technologically impressive, PLATO had difficulty gaining massive adoption. In the 1970s, CDC acquired the rights to sell and commercialize PLATO.
When asked in an interview in 1988 on the reasons why CDC failed to commercialize PLATO, Donald Bitzer (one of the founding engineers who created PLATO) blamed CDC’s corporate culture on the decision to rewrite course materials for PLATO despite having rights to the original courseware developed by the founding team. He noted that the CDC’s cost of development averaged at $300,000 per delivery hour, which meant that CDC had to charge high prices for the hardware, as well as content delivery charges in order to recoup their costs.
In 1972, a PLATO terminal was said to run at $12,000. Additionally, clients would have to pay $50 / hour for content delivery, on top of telephone bills that a client would have to pay to use PLATO.
Amongst a myriad of factors, an expensive investment, as well as expensive recurring costs, made PLATO inaccessible to a large majority.
Limited data surrounding its effects on learning
Going into how it was built. PLATO did not directly involve educational psychologists, learning theorists, and others from the social sciences in its design. As documented by Brian Dear in The Friendly Orange Glow:
Over the next five decades, this decision would fuel criticisms that PLATO was too engineering-centric: built by electrical engineers and physicists with little input or direction from real educators, when, considering PLATO’s mission, it should have been led, designed, and run by educators.
The failure to involve educator’s input had implications on the effectiveness of the system. One research done by the University of Illinois concluded that:
[There was] [n]o significant difference between the post-test scores of students who received instruction via PLATO system and those who attended regular class. However, the amount of time spent on the lesson material was significantly less for the students working on PLATO.
However, more reports could be found that revealed different conclusions such as:
PLATO provided “no lasting benefits”
students who had taken mathematics on PLATO “gained twice as much [on achievement tests] as in the past.”
students and educators enjoyed working with PLATO, but did not have a significant impact on student achievement”.
The variation in conclusions made it inconclusive if PLATO was an effective tool for learning.
Conclusion
Audrey Watters is a huge proponent of ed-tech amnesia. In her essay, she writes:
[Ed-tech amnesia] is, this profound forgetting if not erasure of the history of the field. And I don’t just mean forgetting or erasing what happened in the 1950s or 1980s. I mean forgetting what happened five, ten years ago. Some of this is a result of an influx of Silicon Valley types in recent years — people with no ties to education or education technology who think that their ignorance and lack of expertise is a strength. And it doesn't help, of course, that there is, in general, a repudiation of history within Silicon Valley itself. Silicon Valley's historical amnesia — the inability to learn about, to recognize, to remember what has come before — is deeply intertwined with the idea of "disruption" and its firm belief that new technologies are necessarily innovative and are always "progress."
As a product, PLATO did not receive much input from educators. Because the product did not have much input from educators, PLATO was engineered to be extremely flexible, allowing the course producers to structure the content in any way they please. As a result, it is unclear whether PLATO was effective as a learning tool. What did become apparent was that the flexibility spawned a series of inventions unrelated to education. From the lens of education, PLATO can be seen as a failure, but from the lens of cyberculture, PLATO was a smash hit.
In light of ed-tech amnesia, philosopher George Santayana exclaims:
Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
2020 has been an exciting year for EdTech. Millions of dollars have been invested in the sector and we’re optimistic about Technology making a meaningful impact on Education. But at the same time, it is also important for us to examine if any of the companies we see today are promising more than what they can actually deliver. Understanding the failure of PLATO as an education tool has led us to ask - MOOCs like Udemy, SkillShare, and MasterClass are increasing in popularity, but are they designed for optimal learning? Our early research suggests no, but we’ll be exploring this deeper in a separate article.
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