From: Barry Kort Subject: Greetings to EdNet To: ednet@noc1.oit.umass.edu Date: Mon, 5 Jun 1995 15:08:03 -0400 (EDT) Cc: bkort@musenet.org (Barry Kort) Greetings, Rob has asked me to host a conversation about innovations in educational computer networking and related topics. I'm delighted to have this opportunity and I welcome your comments, questions, and criticisms. To fill in a bit of background, so you will know who I am... I graduated from the University of Nebraska in 1968 with a Bachelor's in Electrical Engineering, whereupon I joined the technical staff of AT&T Bell Laboratories. Bell sent me off to Stanford to complete my graduate studies in Systems Theory, Operations Research, and Engineering Economic Systems Analysis. I spent nearly 20 years doing network planning for AT&T, until Judge Greene broke up the Bell System and left Bell Labs an orphaned child whose parents were preoccupied putting their shattered business back together. I joined the Educational Technology Research Group at Bolt Beranek and Newman about 5 years ago as a Visiting Scientist with no credentials in education research. Worse than that, everyone kept telling me there was no money in education and that the schools had no funding for technology. Perfect. Here was a chance to work on a real problem (the crisis in education) that few were working on (because there was no funding). Since I love a good challenge, I decided to take the no-funding constraint at face value and see what could be done with no resources whatsoever. I had already been doing volunteer work at the Museum of Science in Boston, where I spend weekends in the Children's Discovery Center. This is a Montessori-type room with lots of resources, kits, and other hands-on goodies. The focus at the Museum of Science is on informal science education, and having fun at learning and doing science. Meanwhile, back at BBN, I was thinking about ways to do what we did at the Museum of Science using computers and computer networks. A lot of people foresaw the possibility of putting schools on the Internet, but few had any ideas for what kids would actually do online (beyond sending E-Mail to keypals). It reminded me a lot of the early days of Television, when the medium was new, and no one really knew how to use it well. My own role model from those early days was Don Herbert -- Mr. Wizard -- who can still be seen on Nickelodeon today. Other pioneers in early children's television included Burr Tilstrom, the puppeteer who created Kukla Fran and Ollie. Beyond that, there was Howdy Doody (which pioneered having kids participate on camera) and not much else. When Howdy Doody went off the air, there was this guy in a clown suit named Clarabelle who went on to invent the second generation of children's educational television. His name was Bob Keeshan -- Captain Kangaroo. The third generation of children's television began with Joan Ganz Cooney who founded Children's Television Workshop and produced Sesame Street. She recruited a gifted young puppeteer named Jim Henson. Henson's role model had been Burr Tilstrom. So here we were in the 1990's with another new medium -- the Internet. It was time to do for the Internet what Don Herbert and Buffalo Bob and Burr Tilstrom and Bob Keeshan and Joan Ganz Cooney and Jim Hensen had done for children's educational TV. It was time to make it fun (and educational) for kids. While exploring the Internet, looking for ideas, I stumbled across a new phenomenon that was sweeping a lot of college campuses. A graduate student at Carnegie-Mellon had written a computer program called TinyMud which ran on the Internet. College kids were connecting to these so-called MUDs (Multi-User Dimensions) to chat, to collaborate, to program, and to build community. MUDs were part simulation model, part chat -- a social conversation space in which the participants also built the world. The programming language was primitive, but easy to learn. People who had no formal training in computer programming were building whimsical -- and often elaborate -- synthetic worlds. Not just scenery, mind you. This was like the Tiki-Tiki House at DisneyLand. Everything could come to life through programmed automation or through artful puppetry. The level of creativity was awesome. And this was all being done in text. Plain ASCII. The pictures were in your head, just like in the good old days of Radio. (You remember Radio. Back before TV.) So I helped start MicroMuse, the first text-based virtual reality for the K-12 community, with a focus on informal science education. Today, 5 years later, MicroMuse is still running on an MIT machine loaned to us by Professor Hal Abelson of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab. I'll tell you more about MicroMuse in the next message. Barry