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The Brown/MIT Vannevar Bush Symposium

Notes from the Panels

Quote from Interactions article: "...the closing panels on both days provided moments of synthesis that brought together many ideas expressed during the individual presentations. The questions for the panel on the first day on the first day ranged from the ethics of malleable content, which sparked an interesting debate between Ted Nelson and Tim Berners-Lee about the best methods of protecting author rights, and concerns about McCarthy-style witch hunts, through questions on handling 'spaghetti-web' information structure problems, to projections about all-electronic libraries and digitally alive paper and clothing.

The final panel was extraordinary in that Douglas Engelbart, Tim Berners-Lee, and Alan Kay gave mini-presentations that elaborated and extended the themes addressed in their speeches, and the entire panel participated vigorously in debates around two questions: 1) what would our world be like if Microsoft had never existed, and 2) how can we improve our educational system. In response to the final question asking the panelists to comment on what they had in common, Berners-Lee gave a striking analysis:

'...one thing everybody had in common was persistence, having ideas and, then though people told you not to do it, hanging on to it, begin really stubborn and doing it, even though nobody's giving you money to do it. That seems to be something which everybody has in common. I don't know if it's something that's intrinsic to us or whether it's the ideas - once they've got you, they don't let go.'"

Panel - first day

QUESTION

Rickie Goldman Segal

This question is for Robert Kahn.

I deal a lot with video animation tools. I was concerned about this notion of malleable content. I guess what worries me and that I think about is what happens when the video images are images of people in our own research, that we've taken in our own research, of children and adults doing all kinds of things. Now we have ethical approval to use them. We might even have ethical approval to put them on the Internet. What happens when someone else uses that and takes it out of context. Not just a question of authorship or property rights - an issue of ethics.

Robert Kahn

Malleable content is not exactly a household word. Even today in the world of what I would call hard copyright there are moral rights that do attach to that material. You might think that after copyright runs out you can do anything you want but under the Bern convention there are still moral rights retained by authors. So, for example, if you were to try and do syncopated whoever and the estate did not want you to do that because they thought it impinged on the moral rights of the musical work's writer, they could stop you, legally. Similar kinds of constraints occur in related areas. So moral rights even pertain when you have hard copyright where you think it is now in public domain but it was originally protected. My sense of what's needed to happen is that people need to be able to state what it is that they are willing to have happen to material that they have rights in. And, if somebody really does not want somebody else to manipulate material that they have rights in then that is their prerogative and therefore it is.. all the trappings of the law that would normally pertain in whatever part of the world that you're in would apply to that. On the other hand I can see many people providing material where they say that you can make changes.

For example, suppose I have created a film called, lets say, "Gone with the Wind" and I put it out into cyberspace in a form where the storyline was out there and the motions of the characters were out there but only thing that was not really fixed was the actual choice of characters or the location, but all the rest of it was.

Ted Nelson

I'd just like to once again explain how the transcopyright seems to some people to solve this issue. You see, what's been at the end of the trail here has been the problem that all copyright owners have under this Bern convention the right to stop you from taking things out of context. And meanwhile, people are downloading things on the network and inventing for themselves all sorts of schemes in the mind that make it reasonable and correct and in total ignorance of the law. So the transcopyright proposal is that anyone can reuse this arbitrarily in a new context, pre permission for that new context with the understanding that all the pieces will be bought from the originator.

Now, what about altering the bytes? This is where it gets in trouble. The only way the transcopyright thing works is, if the bytes are always obtained from the originator. If you want it to be stretched and morphed or something like that what the map then contains is the directions for how to stretch and morph these things once you download them and that gives the desired result, so malleability is possible within that framework on a strict basis.

The reason that some people want to talk about the moral issue and others of us want to talk about the legal issues is that moralisms can blow away with the wind, whereas if you can set down some guidelines that can be implemented as a workable solution that people can live with that can have a long term effect.

Tim Berners-Lee

I can offer an alternative. The alternative point of view to suggesting the transcopyright should be mandated. I want to make two observations. First of all, to observe that a system that tries to constrain how people behave doesn't fly. So for example, if you make a documentation that requires that everybody write in a given word processor it doesn't work. If you try to make a system that changes the way the relationships that people have, which forces them into some mold, even if the CEO of a company of 50,000 people mandates it, they will use it under coercion and it won't really work. So, the reason that hypertext is neat is that it is very unconstrained, its allows a lot of flexibility.

The second observation is that when you look at the agreement under which information is passed from one person to another - or anything else, for that matter, such as cornflakes. When you buy cornflakes you think that at first level there is an exchange whereby money goes in one direction and cornflakes go in the other direction. But, what in fact what you're getting is your getting the cornflakes and on the packet there's a new pc bar code where if you send it in you can get 100 free miles, or a free camera, or 10 free rolls of film. And if you combine it with a UPC from a particular brand of washing powder you can get a free ticket to the theatre, so its a very complex agreement. There's an incredible amount of legal and illegal tender which have crept in here. So, if you're going to allow this sort of behavior to go on which marketing people seem to do, they seem to need to have 16 different types of train ticket and 18 different types of airplane ticket in order so as to extract the most money from the populace, then if you are going to represent that in the system, if you are going to represent the commerce and the agreement on the network, the network has to be extremely flexible.

So, when you pass information from one place to another, basically you have to be able to pass an arbitrarily complicated expression of the license terms. Even when you buy a color video. What do you get the right to do when you take a video home with you? It doesn't have a complex license on it but you have the understanding that you can show it under reasonable terms so long as your not on an [[can't make out]] or an oil rig to the people who can fit in your house, and its reasonable to watch it twice as well as long as you get it back by the date. If you try to write that sort of thing down in LISP it gets frightfully complicated. If you don't write the thing in LISP and you sent the thing over the network and it sits there on a proxy server and someone asks for it - this is serious network traffic, this is video, so the proxy server is very interested in if it can give you a copy. If it doesn't understand the license agreement because it can't read it, it can't work out whether a) it can give it to you for free and b) give it to you and charge you a certain amount and pass the cash back. so, in fact this is a really big hairy problem. In fact, solving that problem if you can find a solution you may solve a whole lot of other problems accidentally.

If you try to make a system that forces people to change the way they relate, it wont' work. The issue of the computer trying to manage multiple licenses with multiple pieces is very very hairy. Need simple protocols.

QUESTION

Roger Blumberg

In Bush's paper he cites the disappearance of Mendal's paper as a catastrophe that in reforming modes of transmission and communication one must avoid. I would ask each of you to speculate about the future of reforms modes of communication and transmission and what catastrophes should we avoid.

Ted Nelson

I see ours as an age of information loss - different format. NASA has a job designation of data archeologist. Smalltalk article. Irritated with PARC and Alan Kay.

Michael Lesk

Saving old data is a problem that can be solved. The problem that worries me is potential loss of diversity in information sources. We need to work on making multimedia authoring easier.

QUESTION

David Klaphaak

Bush was an extraordinary manager. One of his concerns was directing the efforts he was in charge of towards essentially specialized tasks. How do we address the funding of the Internet as essential services.

Robert Kahn

connectivity is the crucial characteristics of the Internet. This is a marketplace service now. The market will deal with those issues. Oversight process becoming broader - not just government, but commercial and international. The oversight is in the area of ensuring that the process is maintained effectively.

QUESTION

Eric Nelson

Would McCarthy style witch hunt be more vicious with these tools? Specifically, does one leave a trail when one uses the net.

Doug Engelbart

This is the kind of thing that interests me a lot - long term impact of how our social process will change and some of those changes are bad.

Ted Nelson

the creation any new tools creates a new adversarial method. Every new capability creates a deprived class and a privileged class.

Tim Berners-Lee

civilization is walking a road between the mountain of despotic dictatorship and the swamps of terrorism. Perhaps one of the answers is making a sort of fractal society with the right number and kinds of personal links. You know people who know people...

QUESTION

Rosemary Simpson

This question is for Ted Nelson. You mentioned spaghetti webs and information programming and you alluded to Dykstra in your talk. Would you address that issue - what solutions you would propose for enabling us to create better structured hypertexts given the tools that we have now.

Ted Nelson

The important thing is to include the tools. Right now what Tim has given us in the way of addressability is great. We need to makes these bi-followable . And secondly, transclusion - meaning that you can look at something in different contexts - and transparallel visualization in browser. Transclusion and transparallelism are the answer. It doesn't matter what the question is.

Doug Engelbart

I think there is a lot more to it than that. There are a lot of tool changes, a lot to explore - in the way knowledge is dynamically developed by a collective group.

QUESTION

Raj Reddy

When should libraries stop funding current library systems and go to all electronic?

Michael Lesk

by 2010 most will not be buying objects - they will be buying the right to access objects.

Raj Reddy

what is the right transition path?

Michael Lesk

I know more places where the library wants to move but faculty holding up. Write-only journals.

QUESTION

Stu Card

What about the papertronic system - mixed system

Michael Lesk

I believe that paper will stay with us. Digitally alive paper and clothing

Doug Engelbart

Somethings you look at and say its inevitable. Dont know the time exactly, but I think that paper's day is doomed.

Ted Nelson

Everyone's information environment is essentially their spiritual environment. Your sense of identity. Paperless world is inevitable and it will be great. Virtual surround. I'm very happy at this moment to be between two of the men I admire most in the world

Tim Berners-Lee

I love books too. Its hard to get hardware that you can layer and put on the wall like you can paper. Perhaps virtual paper?

Panel - second day

QUESTION

We started this discussion by looking at Bush's vision of memex and we just Alan talk about the golden age of the sixties and we've ended up with Windows, which is kind of a bleak thought. So, I'd like to ask each of you to postulate about where we would be if Windows never existed. Would we be someplace else and where would we be? If Microsoft didn't exist.

Michael Lesk

We'd be missing nothing. Microsoft doesn't even claim that they are a highly innovative company. They take products that have already existed and sold well from other vendors such as Word Perfect and they do a commercially better job rewriting these programs and selling them as Excel and Word Perfect. We wouldn't be missing any important technology.

Questioner

So you think we'd be in exactly the same place. Personal computing would look the same.

Michael Lesk

[[shrugs]] As far as I can see.

Alan Kay

At PARC one of the goals was to do NLS as a distributed system and all of the ALTOs had the five-finger keyboards as well as the mouse on them. We basically loved NLS and we'd done a few modifications which we thought even sped up.. NLS part of the interaction scheme on it was, I believe, because the analog mouse there was some drift in it, so one of the things that they did was to say what kind of a thing you were pointing at, so you'd say move character or move word or move paragraph and so forth. It was kind of a procedure where you gave the command first and then bug bug and then command accept. We realized at Xerox PARC that you wanted to have a speedy scheme for interacting and we thought we could go even one better by selecting the objects, so you'd select something you'd do something to, give the command and then, in the case of move character you'd go select, move, select and it would it with fewer keystrokes.

Now, the abortion that happened after PARC was the misunderstanding of the user interface that we did for children, which was the overlapping window interface which we made as naive as absolutely we possibly could to the point of not having any work flow ideas in it and that was taken over uncritically out into the outside world. So we have many systems, like Lotus Notes and many mail systems that when you say replay it comes up with a window over the very thing you were reading as though there weren't any connection between these things. So this is an abortion to me, but its basically part of the whole feel. Whereas our notion was that you start the kids off on this fairly simple, naive thing and then there would be an actual progression where you would get up to this several commands a second kind of thing that you could do with NLS. If you have ever seen anybody use NLS it is really marvelous cause you're kindof flying along through the stuff several commands a second and there's a complete different sense of what it means to interact than you have today. I characterize what we have today as a wonderful bike with training wheels on that nobody knows they are on so nobody is trying to take them off. I just feel like we're way way behind where we could have been if it weren't for the way commercialization turned out.

Doug Engelbart

Well, strangely enough, I feel the same. It's part of the thing of the easy to learn and natural to use thing that became sortof a god to follow and the marketplace is driving it and its successful and you could market on that basis, but some of the diagrams pictures that I didn't quite get to the other day was how do you ever migrate from a tricycle to a bicycle because a bicycle is very unnatural and very hard to learn compared to a tricycle, and yet in society it has superseded all the tricycles for people over five years old. So the whole idea of high-performance knowledge work is yet to come up and be in the domain. Its still the orientation of automating what you used to do instead of moving to a whole new domain in which you are going to obviously going to learn quite a few new skills. And so you make analogies of suppose you wanted to move up to the ski slopes and be mobile on skis. Well, just visiting them for an afternoon is not going to do it. So, I'd love to have photographs of skateboards and skis and windsurfing and all of that to show you what people can really if they have a new way supplied by technology to be mobile in a different environment. None of that could be done if people insisted that it was an easy-to-learn thing.

So, moving your way around those thought vectors in concept space - I'd forgotten about that

Alan Kay

You said that, right?

Doug Engelbart

I must have, its so good. [[laughter]] Its to externalize your thoughts in the concept structures that are meaningful outside and moving around flexibly and manipulating them and viewing them. Its a new way to operate on a new kind of externalized medium. So, to keep doing it in a model of the old media is just a hangup that someplace we're going to break that perspective and shift and then the idea of high performance and the idea of high performance teams who've learned to coordinate, to get that ball down the field together in all kinds of operations. I feel like the real breakthrough for us getting someplace is going to be when we say 'All right, lets put together high-performance, knowledge-work teams and lets pick the roles they're going to play within our organizations in some way in such even though they operate very differently from their peers out in the rest of the organization they can interact with them and support them very effectively. So there are roles like that that would be very effective and everyone else can sortof see because they're interacting with these guys what they can do. And suppose it does take 200 hours of specialized training - that's less than boot camp.

One of those boxes on that paradigm map about deployment was really coming down and showing you that special purpose teams are one kind of thing in the way that they can propagate and very different from moving a group of people who have an existing set of staff and processes and methods and skills and equipment and trying to move them all together. It's practically an impossible task to do that in any significantly large step without having casualties. They just aren't all equipped to mobile in that space.

So, there's a lot to go with that and it all stems from looking at today and saying 'why do we accept that?' That's the modern thing, its almost a religion. In any other company I'd be afraid to bring that out. Maybe I'll have to run from you too...

Ted Nelson

I hadn't heard you say this before. So you are basically proposing some kind of information SWAT team that can move swiftly through an organization, or is going to be some sort of elite 'eizatsgroupe' in the files. This is a very exciting and interesting concept, but how would that function organizationally?

Doug Engelbart

I mentioned the other day that you've got to have a strategy to lift organizations - you can't just lift them all at once. The strategy that I finally worked out is that improvement infrastructure - a term I mentioned, I didn't show you much below that - in that improvement infrastructure there are roles in the improvement process for high performance teams. They would really be helping the improvement process come about, there would be roles for them to be plugged into an organization in a function that would be very supportive, and this is all supposing that these are the outposts and that everybodies going to start moving there as soon as you can, but you just can't lift the whole organization in some very radical way. So yes, they are an elite team, but you're assuming that in some number of years you'll learn how to get the whole organization there.

Tim Berners-Lee

I think that the gruesome practical point is that when you, that finding a path of a so-called vector through concept space to where you are may be one thing, but to get the world there may be a very very different path. So you have to find a path, from wherever they are, for pushing the world vectors, where each step is down-hill for the person who has to make that step. So your original question was does Microsoft's existence and the dominance of DOS and later Windows helped. So, basically if at some point Microsoft has to make a changeover that's going to be one of the more difficult things to put them in a position so that the next step is downhill. One of the things that can make that easier is that if instead of having just one operating system you have two. You might ask, for example, what would have happened if the Mac hadn't been there. Maybe we'd still be using DOS without Windows. So, there's an argument which says that its easier to When you're in a situation where you don't have any dominance you don't have any commonality. Maybe that's what held up UNIX because the developers didn't have any commonality. Without code that you can pass around its difficult to spread things around. So the fact that you have DOS there at least means that if you're not trying to change the operating system you can roll out all kinds of software very quickly, so that's got a great advantage. If you can do what you want with the Internet and DOS, then you can do it very quickly. It's when you want to change the Internet or change DOS that you've got yourself a big problem. So the way I hope that it will work for the Web protocols and the WWW standards which I hope will be able to evolve from their kludgy current state towards that beautiful golden dream is that in any case where you lay down a standard, you also allow there to a second and you show a path whereby is a third one comes up that is better you can move in that direction on the heels of the first, keeping it honest and you have a hook in it to be able to hook it all together later on.

Alan Kay

American television is kind of a counter example. In the effort to make it really easy for every body to watch television I'm not sure I see any path back upwards toward enlightenment because the advertisers are quite happy and so is Microsoft in the stage of blindness that everybody's in right now. So I don't think its a great idea. There's an economic law, called Gresham's Law, that says that the bad that's easily produced drives out the good because it resets the whole notion of normality. So, personally I think that if somebody invented a bicycle now they couldn't get anybody to buy it because it would take more than five minutes to learn, and that is really pathetic.

Ted Nelson

As far as television is concerned, the operative phrase a few minutes ago was 'a comfortable step down'.

Doug Engelbart

I say, why not make your steps up comfortable. It's going to take stress, but then you have to minimize it. You know, the older you get the harder it is to change. I keep getting that thrown back at me "you're going to ask all the old guys who are ready to retire that they're supposed to shift and change?'. The only answer is that a) look, there is a lot of potential for organizations to get a lot more competent in their knowledge work, just a lot more. And its going to take a lot of change. The organizations that learn how to do it are going to be successful and maybe the only ones that'll survive, including mankind. So look, we've got to get there. So what you need to do is say 'Look, we have to find a strategy that's as smart as possible for accommodating all the human and social characteristics that change has to cope with as well as the dynamics and expense of changing, etc. So that's the major push in our bootstrapping thing is to say, Yes, it looks like a very smart thing to do is to build an appropriate improvement infrastructure, and then as rapidly as possible get the improvements in these capabilities so that they can plug into the improvement structure too, so that you are improving your improvement process maybe even faster than the other. That looked like the only strategy I could think of and there's a practical way to go after it, so strange as it sounds that's what we're after, so anyway...

[[ Question and answer about ARPA funding policies and their effect on research ]]

QUESTION

Bob Franston, Microsoft.

I'm not going to defend Windows, but what I want to try to understand is why Windows is such a problem. If you have to change the world all at once and you can't coexist with what exists, you've a problem. The Web is a great example of independent of Windows it adds great functional capability. There are lots of examples, Andy's roller blades, people doing AutoCad interactive systems, just be cause people decide that its worth investing major amounts of time to learn new paradigms, new systems, it doesn't mean you give up the rest. Do you really feel like to have to change all the world at once, or what are the problems with getting people to try out pilots in industry or in the world at large [I couldn't really understand his words so I'm not confident about this transcript]

Doug Engelbart

The only thing I can see is that you have to pilot software, there has to be some sort of conscious pursuit of that future that you can't really guarantee is there, but to say look...

Frankston

Take Notes, for example. Trying to get people to adopt that it had similar barriers. Its far from perfect, but it had some utility which some people eventually found.

Alan Kay

I don't think its worth commenting at length about it, but I think my main point is that MS-DOS got millions of people used to as a normal mode of interaction that would have been barfed at in the mid'60s. But they didn't know that they could interact better with the machine so it set a really low standard. Just like television sets a low standard if you don't know what theater can do you're never going to find out by watching television. That's the problem. So, its not that you can't do other kinds of things but if any on this, lets put Apple in there as well, because from the standpoint that we are talking about the Apple interface isn't any better than MS-DOS is and Windows. They are basically part and parcel of monolithic thinking.

For instance if you wanted to put in a Englebartian scheme in your application in Apple or Windows user interface its almost impossible to do because the theory of interaction is buried so deeply in there that you can't say 'OK I want to interact in a different way" and yet in any reasonable object-oriented implementation of these things as in fact there was at Xerox PARC, you could sit down and design your own interactive interface. In fact, NLS had this interesting thing where they actually... You could drive the user interface... In any part of the system you could make up a new user interface if you wanted to experiment. They had this grammar-driven... so you could put in an interface grammar yourself and use it to drive commands if you were experimenting. So it was what I would think of as an open system It didn't force the user to go the way it did, it was actually extensible in some very interesting ways. You've probably never shown that in a talk because its more complex than some of the other stuff

Doug Engelbart

Its interesting. When he was talking about the emergence of Smalltalk there, well what do you think we've encapsulated - well NLS grew into Augment and now we've got a Smalltalk encapsulation package that gives you a very flexible kind of interfacing that you can go conventional if you want to but you can shift, but anyway I take my hat off to Alan about providing that way to Smalltalk.

Michael Lesk

I get to listen to a number of researchers complain that the development groups or the users in general aren't willing to adopt their ideas. Sometimes I ask these people to look at their own desk and ask how willing are they to say I want to be the first user on this floor of bubble memory instead of magnetic disk", or "I've just abandoned the C compiler because I've just heard about Eiffel and I think its really wonderful and I want to try it". I don't hear that very often from people and they ought to accept that they are not different from the rest of the world. They are thinking the same way.

QUESTION

Samual Epstein, Sensemedia.net

I guess I'm young enough to not totally believe that there isn't any validity to the conspiracy theory that Ted was referring to the other day and things are pretty screwed up if you look at what was going on 20 years ago. I have to say that I've had my own experience that was described earlier today about not being able to turn in a laser-printed report and the excuse I was given was that "well, the computer wrote this and for this English class you have to write this" and I have to say that when we're looking at the big picture here I find that in my own personal case and I know there's others like me that with very few exceptions of actively searching out the people that are up on the stage here and others like you and finding this knowledge and trying to do something with it, the current educational system in this country seems to be doing a really good job of helping to create and accrete these established self interests which seem to prevent the dissemination of this information and also seem to encourage this "well if it takes more than five minutes don't waste your time to create this" environment. Do you have a recommendation of how we can restructure, improve, modify the established educational system so that access to the information you're talking about is available to people who want to do things with it.

One of the things that Alan mentioned, he held up on a slide, the book "The Molecular Biology of the Gene". I find this very funny because if I had to name four books that did it for me, that basically set my career, the first one was "Computer Lib/Dream Machines", the next one was "The Molecular Biology of the Gene", and the other two which I have sortof lumped together were Newman and Sproull and Foley and van Dam. The last one, which I read just a few years ago, was "The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer" by Edward Yourdon. These were the things that allowed me to build up a career and maybe other people too, often at the expense of or despite their academic career. How can we integrate these things together so they don't seem to be so conflicting.

Alan Kay

Looking back I think that one of the paradoxes is that we made a complete mistake when we were doing the interface at PARC because we assumed that the kids would need an easy interface because we were going to try and teach them to program and stuff like that, but in fact they are the ones who are willing to put hours into getting really expert at things - shooting baskets, learning to hit baseballs, learning to ride bikes, and now on video games. I have a four-year old nephew who is really incredible and he could use NLS fantastically if it were available He would be flying through that stuff because his whole thing is to become part of the system he's interacting with and so if I had had that perspective I would have designed a completely different interface for the kids, one in which how you became expert was much more apparent than what I did. So I'm sorry for what I did.

Samual Epstein

Let me rephrase my question a little bit..

Lee Sproull

Wait, wait, before you rephrase it let me point out - you're stuck with it - that Alan and Pappert did do a very wise thing which was to focus on kids because not only do they have the time to learn weird and strange new things, but they love doing it and that counts for a lot.

Ted Nelson

A design of media... As soon as you establish premises you pretty much lock in on track. For example, the time slot determines the system we call television. Once you have the time slot in commercial television, the rest is given, forget it. Similarly, once you have 'the curriculum', plus the implicit necessity of keeping the dance cards of all those teachers filled... in other words its a system for employment of teachers and so each teacher has to have an excuse for what he is doing all the time, then basically you have the educational system as we now know it.

As I heard your question, Sam, and by the way Sam and I go back to when he was twelve, if I heard your question correctly you said 'How can we fix the educational system as we now know it', and of course I think that that is a contradiction in terms. The point is to get rid of what is in the way, and that is the curriculum, and that is the guaranteed employment for teachers, because that essentially is what is in the way of the students. If we could have a system, for example, where you simply say to a number of fourteen-year olds... Right now we say to them "You must sit here for four years enduring the Duke of History and the Mistress of Mathematics and whatever you dislike about them because they will fix your point of view.

You see, education is a process of ruining subjects for you and the last subject to be ruined determines your profession. Each subject is personified with the face of this local ogre, or perhaps in some cases with a wondrous person, who then represents that subject and you never find out that every subject has something in it of interest to you. Every subject can have something in it that you take into your heart. I thought I hated history, I thought I hated mathematics because of the people I encountered and so some other way around. I would like to see a school system where you simply say to the kids at fourteen not "you have to sit here for four years and enduring and enduring and enduring and being endangered and insulted" but rather "You can get out of here as soon as you present for examination any of these any 80 of these 1000 mini-courses on this sheet. You can take more if you want and learn more before we send you out there. Have your choice." Then I think we would see real motivation because right now there is no way students can exercise initiative, except a) if they are male, disobeying, and b) if they are female, getting pregnant, and c) totally obeying and outdoing whatever the teacher wants, which is done by very few. Whereas if we give people a way to learn by initiative then we'd fix the problem but nobody wants to do that.

Samual Epstein

That was what my question was really directed at - not at the technology but at the current system and how can we make it more conducive to bringing people online and getting the kids involved.

Alan Kay

Its like the cops need criminals. Its a very complex thing. Seymour [[Pappert]] and I were in Washington yesterday morning talking to two congressional committees about just this problem and of course both of us were conscious of the irony that we were actually talking to the people who were in business to stay in business. So the interest in changing things in any big way is something that is very far from what they're trying to do. For instance, the average expenditure for children in the US is about 6500/year. If you multiply that out on a classroom you get to around 185 to 200 thousand dollars per classroom. Well, those classrooms are not receiving anywhere near $185,000 a year. From half to three quarters is soaked up by a bureaucracy, so it never gets down to the school or the kids or anything else. And I think that is an enormous problem. And basically we said exactly what you were saying which is that the problem is that there is a curriculum and we invoked the name of Montessori whose idea was that school should always be an extended kindergarten and its the job of people who design the kindergarten to make what happens when you use it for your own reasons more interesting than the regular world is. And that's what Montessori did and I think that's an excellent way of thinking of designing a learning system.

Ted Nelson

Do you know what curriculum means in Latin - little racetrack.

Alan Kay

Yeah

Tim Berners-Lee

Ted, you suggest basically breaking the curriculum up into little pieces. The Montessori system it allows you to do what ever you like so long as whatever Montessori school you use the same colors for the same lengths for the same blocks. So you're put within a very constrained world there and I think one of the things I took out of your questions, which is clearly a good question, that there are four books that for you could have been your education. Given a computer, the network, and those four books, you would have been happy, you would achieved a lot of things, and would have wasted a lot less time.

Samual Epstein

and I was

Tim Berners-Lee

and you managed to find them. The question is how can other people find them.

Samual Epstein

right.

Tim Berners-Lee

For you, one of the things you could say is that should be a curriculum. The problem is, the reason that I feel that the curriculum won't go away... There's a neat television program in which the BBC took four poor scientists who had been denied acceptance by the academic community, their papers hadn't been published, these beautiful ideas, wonderful ideas were just outside, they were just too different and interesting, and what they did, in fact, was to show by the end of the program that they were also total junk.

So, the problem is that if you don't have the curriculum, then you leave somebody.. its like throwing somebody out straightaway you say 'All right guys, you're here to be free, to learn, and here's the net and basically they might as well do that at home. So what you're really asking is, education in the sense of leading somebody, is there a sense for having something which is established as being reasonable for people to spend their formative years studying. The problem is that it takes too long to get really good ideas into that.

Now, looking back at things that Ted said and saying 'that's really cool, that should be taught really early on, that should happen in the first grade. It's taken a long time for people to do that because there's a filtration process. If you leave people to look at all the information, you also want to lead them and say 'hey, this is really interesting'. Sometimes it seems that the situations we've got, the mechanisms we have for filtering this and reviewing it just takes generations.

My only suggestion if we're going to change that filtering system in some cases, for example with computing we can move to a biological model. So you can leave all your programming people around and you let people do projects and hey you give them the CPU power and if they make something which demonstrably works and bubbles and enthuses people and now you've got the net and you can actually use biological methods in some cases. You can't do that for learning good history but in some cases you can use biological methods and get a faster turnaround because you can use computing and a whole lot of people out there who will participate during the hours of darkness to try these things out.

Doug Engelbart

You know it just occurred to me that giving us equal time is not fair because in the same amount of time he can say so much more [[laughs]].

Alan Kay

That was the problem with Butler [[Lamson]].

Doug Engelbart

Yeah, right, Butler. I just want to say that all these things are very relevant to look at about how you educate children in that they can learn more and differently, but the thing is that the institution of education is not likely to be changed by the children, it will be changed by the people that are there in the current state in order to change it. And we can't wait we can't wait for the 20 years or so 'til those children are out integrated into society where they have the roles that they could start making changes. The change driving things about both world events and the technology are moving too fast so we have, we just faced with the fact that we have to learn a better way to shift organizations with the people that are in them now. So that's really why you need a strategy for it. And its exciting to think of what the children can become and to flourish etc, but the daunting problem that I think we really have to face is how do you deal with the change of the adult world.

Samual Epstein

Thank you, and also thanks for the last twenty years, guys.

QUESTION

Richie Goldman Segal

What I'd like to know is what each of you learned from each other that you didn't know before you got here or and in some sense what you think your biggest similarities are but also what do you think your biggest differences are. Because I think within that we sort of know where some aspects of the field are moving. So, I guess, that's my question.

Lee Sproull

I learned that Ted Nelson and I are alike because we both have purple socks. I'm not wearing mine but he's wearing his. And I learned that Alan Kay actually did believe that kids would be working together using their Dynabooks over the network and I apologize Alan. I should have known that you would believe that. I don't want to be only facetious, but that's a rather difficult question to deal with, so I think that most importantly I have, I wouldn't say I learned bits of information, I experienced I guess a reaffirmation of the importance of the ideas and the importance of the scientists who have been pursuing them, sometimes with reward and honor and sometimes without, but that didn't matter because its the ideas that were important and continue to be important. So what was most important for me was the reaffirmation of that community.

Ted Nelson

I learned that everybody here is more idealistic than I thought. In some cases, some people couldn't be more idealistic [[gesturing towards Doug Engelbart]]

Alan Kay

I just glad to see all these old farts still hanging in there.

Tim Berners-Lee

I guess one thing, which actually Vince Cerf pointed out in a similar sort of mix of people, that one thing everybody had in common was persistence, having ideas and then, even though having people telling you not to do it, hanging on to it and being really stubborn and doing it, even though you're told not to, even though nobody's giving you money to do it. That seems to be something that everybody has to have, had in common. I don't know if its something that's intrinsic to us or whether it's that the ideas, once they've got you they don't let go. Apart from that I guess we're pretty amazingly heterogeneous and the differences are in everything else.

Doug Engelbart

What am I supposed to do. If its to say goodbye, well I enjoyed it thoroughly and it sortof opens my eyes to something that is almost embarrassing - that I've sortof lost track of a lot of things that are going on that are important and that I wish I could keep track of. So, maybe I'll turn over a new leaf or redivide my time differently. Anyway, I heard those remarks about idealistic old farts and I thought 'ok that's why I have to say something'. Thank you for the meeting.

Michael Lesk

There's nothing to say after that. I guess what I thought I learned is once again there are people who are laying out broad visions and there are engineers who are building guts and I'm led back to my preference for the engineers. I'm glad to see that Bush was one, and I realize that this is one of the great engineering institutions of the world and I thank it for running the meeting.

Andy van Dam

That sounds like a good note to finish up on...


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