It was called Plato, and it was created in the 1960s and 1970s, at the University of Illinois. Even though it was used by tens of thousands of students, all over the U.S., most people have never heard of it. That’s why we need Brian Dear’s new book about Plato, called The Friendly Orange Glow. I was amazed to learn how many ed tech innovations were created first in Plato:
- flat-panel graphic displays (they displayed only one color, orange, hence the book’s name)
- touch screens
- collaboration apps for students to work together
- online communities
- multitasking: That means, many people can use the same computer at once–that used to be a serious technical challenge! PLATO was created before the personal computer, so it all ran on “mainframes,” with students using “terminals” (in 2017, it seems like those old-fashioned words need quotation marks!)
- support for instructors to develop lessons without being programmers
- remote computer terminals so that students didn’t have to be right next to the computer (which was really big, and behind a glass wall in a “computer room”)
- PLATO was an open platform, meaning that anyone could build a lesson (foreshadowing today’s open source software)
- a chat room where users could post messages
- instant messaging between users
- an email system
Plato was killed by the growth of the personal computer in the 1980s. Plato was shut down in 1993.
(Plato stands for “Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations”)
The Creativity Guru 