On Fri, 15 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote: > Sounds great. I never saw a PLATO terminal. :-( Wish I had now!
I wish they'd had a few at schools I attended. I think someone on the list mentioned that PLATO content could be viewed on Apple hardware, too. The wikipedia article on it is very detailed. I've always liked the idea of a "full educational kit" meaning that someone creates a nearly comprehensive set of documents written stepwise from absolute beginner level to help you advance to at least a journeyman's level of skill with as many other self-help/self-learning tools thrown in as could be possibly useful. From the description, PLATO seems to have embraced that idea at various points depending on who was writing content. Cool things about PLATO: * It had graphics, but ran on terminals! * It could do animations in the content * It supported speech synthesis. Blind folks want to play too! * Cool people were involved (NSF, Navy, Air Force, many scientists & engineers, Control Data, etc..) * It had a flight simulator! * It punched above it's CPU power for a i8080 * It was said to be easy to code for (TUTOR was the lang, sayeth wikipedia) * They had MUDs and other cool multi-user games, as well as "social media" (ie.. chat and multi-user applications). * Even way back when, they had touch screens! I'm sad I didn't get to learn physics 101 from one! However, my instructor for that class happened to be awesome, so maybe I should have said Linear Equations or Calc II. I had foreign unintelligible mealy-mouthed cut-rate TAs teaching those classes. Puh. I'd have taken an PLATO terminal ANY DAY over those guys since their content would have presumably been in the Queen's clear readable English. Nowadays you have Khan Academy (go Khan!) and other places that have some pretty fabulous courses and content. Not to mention big unis doing open-courses. I think both MIT and Stanford have them. I've downloaded books and materials from the MIT Open Courseware. I also like to take or at least skim courses on things I'm not familiar with aimed at kids. They make a lot fewer assumptions. Motivation I've got. 40 extra hours a week for classes at a brick and mortar school, I sadly do not have (unless I want to lose some serious sleep). So, anything that bootstraps my knowledge in an area in a complete but as-I-get-time fashion, I'm 100% on board with. I also keep old CBT CDROMs and instructional DVDs for various things. They might be old, but they often have more content or did a better job with the illustrations or animations than you get on the web. Learning is great fun to me. School, uhh, not as much. However, I know some people find the collaboration, a live instructor, and friends they make in the social atmosphere to be invaluable for their learning and enthusiasm (which is a learning amplifier, IMHO). I also have to admit that I did learn quite a bit in "labs" for classes I had, especially Astronomy classes. The labs were what kindled a sense of wonder in me. So, learning comes in a constellation of formats. I personally just like the ones that are self-driven the best at this point. I wonder what takes the place of things like PLATO nowadays. Probably a hodge-podge of PeeCee Windows apps and Adobe Flash/AIR apps, I'd guess. I'm not involved in any kind of formal education at this point, so I wouldn't know. -Swift