This document is a transcript of a talk given at a VCF festival about how the personal computer has changed teaching and learning. The speaker discusses their early experiences with computing in the 1970s through mentors like Dean Brown. They witnessed how young children were able to learn programming concepts. While technology has advanced greatly since then, the speaker argues education has not changed its traditional models and has missed opportunities enabled by new technologies. The speaker advocates for self-organized learning environments like Sugata Mitra's "Hole in the Wall" project, allowing students to direct their own learning with open resources.

1. VCF talk April 27
(Slide 1)
“How the Personal Computer has changed
teaching and learning”
(Slide 2)
Picture this: It’s 1972. My first baby is 3 months
old and I know this child is going to have trouble
in school. Why? Because I’m a rebel. I’m 26
and I’ve become a California hippie. Even if this
child doesn’t create his own problems I’m likely
to make them for him.
(Slide 3)
So what do I do? I look at my culture —
backward, forward and all around. I start
studying how people have raised their children
in the past, how education is practiced around
the globe and what technical change is
likely to happen in the future. To be
honest, I’d been interested in this stuff, in
education, psychology, anthropology,
economics and technology for a long time.
Having my own child just meant I have to get
serious about it.
(Slide 4)
It just so happened that my local college and
alma mater, Sonoma State, is offering an

2. extension course, Introduction to
Montessori Education, so I sign up. Sonoma
State is a rural campus. What’s in the library?
Books. And for advanced technology we have
a language lab. There is a computer — one
timeshare system for all six California State
College campuses. Eight people can use it at
a time, sitting shoulder to shoulder in a tiny
terminal room. There are no computer science
courses and very few other departments assign
computing tasks to students. A lot of terminal
time is used for playing games and
programming in BASIC.
(Slide 5)
Back in my Montessori class our instructor, Dr.
Ursula Thrush, intersperses her first two
lectures on Montessori principles with the
comment, “Just wait until Dr. Brown gets
here. He’s teaching our kids to use computers.
It’s amazing. 6-year-olds are writing
programs that let their classmates do their
Montessori lessons on a computer. It’s so
wonderful!” The next class meeting changes my
life. 5 minutes of listening to Dean talk about
what kids can learn and how giving them
access to computing can change teaching and I
know where my career is going.
(Slide 6)

3. Before I go on let me warn you about these
slides. There is too much information on
each one to read now. The slides will be
available to you online so you can find all
the references on them later. For now just
look quickly at them and do your best to
follow my English. I’m sorry I can not speak
to you in Italian. I’d like to get a little
feedback from you folks in this room.
Sometimes I find I’ve prepared the wrong
talk for an audience. For example, I gave the
first session on Computers in Education at
the first West Coast Computer Faire in San
Francisco in 1977. I expected have a room
full of microcomputer hobbyists who didn’t
know anything about teaching but who had
been playing with computers for years.
Instead I had an audience of teachers who
knew nothing about computers but were
anxious to learn. They knew more than I did

4. about students and teaching. I threw out my
notes and just shared with them for the
whole session. You can read the prepared
speech here (link). What I actually said is not
recorded anywhere but lots of people liked
it. So, for you today I can focus on personal
stories about computer pioneers I have
known, or the history of computing in
schools, or how I think we need to reorient
ourselves toward computing and
communication in the future - whatever you
prefer. Please raise your hand high for the
topic that interests you most: (1) Personal
stories. (2) Educational computing. (3)
The future - what’s coming next.
OK. The winner is ___________________.
Luckily my next story about Dean Brown
relates to all three so I don’t have to throw
out my notes yet. Let me tell you about the
person who got me hooked on computing

5. and learning
(Slide 7)
I listen to Dean for 5 minutes and I know this
is my career. I know very little about
computers but I am convinced that these
machines will change the world and that of
my young son, Solomon.
Dean was formally trained as a nuclear
physicist and self-taught philosopher,
religious scholar and biologist. I asked if he
would mentor me. He graciously accepted
the challenge and became a founding
member of my nonprofit organization,
LO*OP Center, Inc. At the time we met
Dean was working at SRI International
where a lot of seminal research was going
on. Several years later he became a founder
of Zilog Corporation and wrote much of the
software for the Z-80 and Z-8000 chips.

6. He introduced me to Silicon Valley
educational pioneers.
(Slide 8)
The people I met were dreamers, pioneers
who explored how computing could
influence our lives and our learning. Like
Dean, they were not trained as elementary
or secondary school teachers although
some were university professors. Among
them were: Doug Engelbart who invented
the computer mouse and promoted
concepts of man-machine interaction, Lud
Braun of Project Solo and…
(Slide 9)
… Bob Albrecht who published popular
books and magazines about computing,
opened the first public access computer
center and spread this idea through his
library project, ComputerTown, USA! and
many others.

7. (Slide 10)
By the way, these slides will be available
online after the Festival with the URLs for
each image. They are part of my History
of Computing in Learning & Education
Project which you can preview at
HCLE.ORG. It is a work in progress.
(Slide 11)
Let’s go back to Dean’s Montessori
classroom in the 1970’s. What was it like
when children were programming in the
Pilot Language?
(Slide 12)
What did a child have to do to use Dean’s
computer system at the Montessori School of
the Golden Gate in San Francisco? The
process is documented in a little book called
“My Friend the Computer” by Jean Rice,
published in 1976. There were no copy
machines at that time so the teacher’s version
of the book came complete with “spirit masters”,
the technology available in schools to make
handout sheets for students.

8. (Slide 13)
To use the computer, first, the student had to
turn on the teletype and the
modem/acoustic coupler (see picture).
Then she had to dial the phone number to
establish a connection to the Decision 2000
mainframe at Lawrence Hall of Science 30 km
away in Berkeley, California. When she heard
the buzzing tones on the phone she pushed
the telephone headset into the acoustic coupler
and hoped the teletype would go “click”.Then
she had to type an access code to connect to
the school’s account on the remote
computer….you can read about it in the book.
(Slide 14)
By the way, there was no screen, only paper.
(Slide 15)
And the only graphics were what you could
create from typewriter characters.
(Slide 16)
So what were kids (and grownups) learning
when they used this “pre-PC” technology, aside
from patience? Several things:
⁃ the idea of a system, of component parts that
all have to work together to achieve a goal
⁃ the concept of a program, of combining a

9. series of relatively simple logical steps to
create a complex result
⁃ ⁃the notion of simulation, building a
model or simple version of a
phenomenon that looks like the real
thing but isn’t. Particularly important
here is the experience of creating
computer programs that appear to be
able to carry on a conversation and will
say whatever you program — including
lying. Concept of Garbage In -
Garbage Out. We were being told at
that time that computers didn’t make
mistakes. This may be true but
programmers make a lot of mistakes and
knowing how to make a computer say
anything you want it to was a very
important lesson.
⁃ the experience of authorship and
control, children who had been told
what to do all their lives got to tell the

10. computer what to do
⁃ the importance of collaboration and
peeragogy, sharing discoveries and
knowledge in an environment where
everyone, including the teacher, is a
beginner and a learner
I think you already know about this first four
items on that list so I’m only going to say a few
words about the last one.
(Slide 17)
The term “Peeragogy” was coined by
Howard Rheingold, who also wrote “Tools for
Thought: The History and Future of Mind-
Expanding Technology” in 1985 and many other
innovative publications. Because everyone who
used a computer was, essentially, a beginner
we were all both teachers and learners.
(Slide 18)
There were many more dreamers but I can’t
tell you about all of them in this short talk.
That’s what the Virtual Museum is for. The
computer pioneers of the 1950’s and ’60’s had
less computing power than a smart watch of
today but they envisioned the technical capacity
coming and speculated about what it might do

11. for education. People like Norburt Weiner, Doug
Englebart, John Kemmeny, Nicholas
Negroponte, Seymour Papert, Alan Kay,
John Seeley Brown and many others, including
my mentor, Dean Brown and Howard
Rheingold. They saw a partnership between
the computer and the human that made best
use of what each did best and freed humans to
advance their curiosity, creativity and
caring for each other. Left to the computers
would be number crunching, storage and
retrieval of whole libraries of facts and
information, and world-wide
telecommunication connecting both people
and machines. Creativity, art and social
interaction would remain the domain of
human beings
(Slide 19)
So what happened? In the ‘70s we
dreamed about what how we might change
teaching and learning. We had computers
and the beginnings of the personal
computer but the major change in education
was to learn about computing.
Throughout the ‘80s, ‘90s and ‘00s

12. engineers and computer scientists
continued to enhance our hardware
capabilities and to decrease the cost of
equipment. The personal computer and its
miniaturized little brother, the smart phone,
happened.
What’s coming in the future? We’ll talk
about that in a few minutes…
(Slide 20)
After the dreaming decade we have had 30
years growth in technology know how. The
3 most important developments are: (1) The
cost of computing came down while our
capacity to store and retrieve information
exploded. In the current decade almost
everyone, including many African and Indian
subsistence farmers can afford to have
the equivalent of a mainframe
supercomputer in their pockets.
(Slide 21)

13. (2), much of the world has been “wired”.
We have gone from an ARPA net of 4 nodes
in 1969 to networks across the globe
connecting by telephone and radio
transmitters and receivers in most cities and
across the countryside so that these
devices can exchange data at lightning
speeds.
(Slide 22)
(3) Software has been written so that
expertise in computing is not needed by
every user.
Professional and amateur programmers have
developed applications for almost everything
— for sniffing out encyclopedias of information,
for ingenious games and entertainment, for
every kind of business transaction, even
preheating your oven while you are away from
home.
(Slide 23)
And applications for learning? There has been
a lot of change but I’m not convinced it has all
been in positive directions. Have we simply

14. taken the old model of classroom
instruction and substituted computers
for books?
(Slide 24)
We have invented the “virtual school”. It is a
simulation of a traditional school: teacher
centered, age-graded, organized by
classroom, with assigned reading, writing,
viewing of videos and completion of assigned
exercises. This is the wrong way to go…
(Slide 25)
School, as we know it is still confining,
constricting, often closing down our
horizons instead of widening them. Those
early dreamers had a vision of how
computing could free us and our children
from the closed walls of the classroom and
open our minds to a much larger world.
After 30 years of dreaming about such
liberation I finally found someone who
was doing it. This is the Hole in the Wall
Project of Indian industrialist, Sugata Mitra.
Mitra watched what happened when he

15. gave Indian slum children access to the
Internet in 1999.
And what is the right way to go? This picture
shows two little slum kids in India who were
given access to an internet-enabled screen and
keyboard. There was no teacher and no
curriculum. But they taught themselves and
each other English and how to find information
on anything that interested them. This 1999
project is called “The Hole In the Wall”
(Slide 26)
The children taught themselves English,
taught each other how to surf the net and
organized their own learning. He then
began a series of additional experiments to
see how much these kids could augment
their education with just access to the
internet.
Experiment 1: DNA Experiment 2:
Grandmother, Experiment 3: Self-
organized schools that implement
Peeragogy in place of pedagogy.

16. (Slide 27)
Mitra advocates replacing traditional
schools and classrooms with what he calls
“SOLE”, Self Organizing Learning
Environments.
(Slide 28)
This is the same theme that I have been
working with for decades. You can envision
the change this way. In traditional education
the teacher controls the learning
environment. He or she sets the goals,
analyzes the characteristics and needs of
the learner and brings together the
materials the student will use - books,
exercise sheets, play spaces and
laboratories.
(Slide 29)
In the future, we can put the learner in
control. The learner set the goals and,
using the huge repository of information,

17. open educational resources and free
courseware, can discover the tools he or
she needs to meet those goals. The teacher
becomes one, among many, resources
available to the student rather than the
center of the teaching-learning process.
This is already happening outside
schools. I worry that, if educators don’t
realize that learners, even very young ones,
have been liberated in today’s information
age, schools and colleges, as we know
them, will become extinct.
(Slide 30)
How has the Personal Computer changed
learning? It hasn’t. Children have been
teaching themselves to walk and talk, two
of the most difficult learning achievements
since before homo sapiens evolved. Adults
have been acquiring new skills throughout
their lives as conditions, environments and

18. technologies change around them. Most
learning happens through observation. What
we don’t learn spontaneously through
watching others still needs to be taught.
With our new technologies we can expand
our exploration of distant or
dangerous environments through
computer-controlled simulations and
virtual reality. But learning is the same.
(Slide 31 )
How has the Personal Computer changed
teaching? Sadly, very little in the present.
Educators have two challenges: First is to
understand how our access to
information has changed and, therefore,
what still needs to be taught. Second our
attitudes toward the use of force and
violence against children have changed so
we must reinvent how we entice them to
learn material that doesn’t seem

19. interesting or important to them.
We need to make 3 fundamental
changes in our basic conceptions of
education. 1st: In-person and remote
curricula, 2nd: learner-centered and
personalized goals and methods, 3rd:
role of the teacher in
telecommunications learning environment.
When this happens we can really say that
the personal computer has truly enhanced
learning and changed teaching.
Sugata Mitra has the right idea. The early
computing pioneers envisioned exciting
possibilities for evolving teaching along with
the development of the personal computer.
But so far we educators have missed
the boat. I invite all of you to come on
board with me.
(Slide 32)
Please email me or catch me during the

20. Festival if you’d like to continue a discussion
about computing in education. Thank you for
joining me on this little journey into the past and
glimpse of the future.
If we have time I’d be happy to respond to
questions and comments