Alan Kay on Marshal McLuhan and the Personal Computer

"The alternative is straightforward. Instead of devising elaborate systems permitting the computer or its instructional contents to control the situation, why not permit the student to control the system, show him how to do so intelligently, and make it easy for him to find his own way? Discard the sequences, items and conversation, and allow the student to move freely through materials which he may control. Never mind optimizing reinforcement or validating teaching sequences. Motivate the user and let him loose in a wonderful place.

Let the student control the sequence, put him in control of interesting and clear material, and make him feel good— comfortable, interested, and autonomous. Teach him to orient himself: not having the system answer questions, all typed in, but allowing the student to get answers by looking in a fairly obvious place. (Dialogue is unnecessary even when it does not intrude.) Such ultra-rich environments allow the student to choose what he will study, when he will study it and how he will study it, and to what criteria of accomplishment he will aim. Let the student pick what he wishes to study next, decide when he wishes to be tested, and give him a variety of interesting materials, events and opportunities. Let the student ask to be tested on what he thinks he knows, when he is ready, selecting the most appropriate form of testing available.

This approach has several advantages. First, it circumvents the incredible obstacles created by the dialogue-item-sequence philosophy. It ends the danger to students of bugs in the material. And last, it does what education is supposed to do—foster student enthusiasm, involvement, and self-reliance.

Under such circumstances students will actually be interested, motivated to achieve far more than they have ever achieved within the normal instructional framework; and any lopsidedness which may result will be far offset by the degree of accomplishment which will occur—it being much better to create lopsided but enthusiastic genius specialists than listless, apathetic, or cruelly rebellious mediocrities. If they start soon enough they may even reach adulthood with natural minds: driven by enthusiasm and interest, crippled in no areas, eager to learn more, and far smarter than people ordinarily end up being.

Enthusiasm and involvement are what really count. This is why the right to explore far outweighs any administrative advantages of creating and enforcing “subjects” and curriculum sequences. The enhancement of motivation that will follow from letting kids learn anything they want to learn will far outweigh any specialization that may result. By the elimination or benign replacement of both curriculum and tests in an ultra-rich environment, we will prevent the attrition of the natural motivation of children from its initially enormous levels, and mental development will be the natural straight diagonal rather than the customary parabola."

You were dissolved by technology? Or did you mean to say you were "disillusioned" by technology?

> Computers et al were supposed to make everything better, right?

No, but they spell better than most people can, and even correct people's spelling guesses. However, since "dissolution" is a real word, even a computer wouldn't have been able to correct this error.

That's exactly the viewpoint that he's arguing against: setting up "technologists" as a kind of high-priest class, the only ones who understand "computers", some nebulous thing that regular people shouldn't bother their heads with, and instead should buy polished, well-engineered consumer experiences. Like Kay and others, he's much more interested in a model of technology that's less black-box. In particular, the thing they object to is the merger of technology/business/design into designing these overarching "experiences" which regular people are just supposed to "use". When such experiences increasingly structure large parts of society, it becomes a bit dangerous of they're all black boxes that regular people aren't supposed to understand or exercise meaningful control over.

Yes, I know, years have passed and software is more complex and it's a more mature industry. But it's still a hell of a lot easier to teach yourself to program, than to teach yourself to put car engines together.

Other than blatant elitism, I don't see any real reason why this can't be the thing your 286 DOS box has in common with Nexus.

Why was it meaningless back then? In Nelson's earliest writings the term "computer" is used mostly to mean big iron with a text UI delivered via a teletype. I think most of his colleagues at the time shared this definition, making it at least meaningful through consensus. Regardless of that, though, if you think it's meaningless now keep in mind that Nelson uses the word "technology" as the main object of his criticism and offers "the computer" as an example.

>I hate this catch-all term that's just a strawman for critics to bash nerds with. If "the computer" is awful, then it might have more to do with management and the business owning class's inability to leverage all these amazing technologies into a product the end user is comfortable with

One of the points Nelson makes in his recent "contrarian computer history" book [1] is that the fate of the computer was sealed before the management even realized just how big of a deal it was. In fact, I think it's fair to say that early on most research fields were shaped more by the participants in those fields than by their non-technical superiors. You could argue that he makes this point precisely because we in the field tend to blame the management to easily for long-standing design decisions.

This brings me to why I dislike his use of the word "tekkie": it promotes a view of an ivory tower critic bashing nerds when in fact the critic in question is one of the nerds that made computing (or at least hypertext and "hypermedia") happen. He, however, happens to disagrees with most others, with a prominent exception being Douglas Engelbart.

>This is like Nelson pissing on the internal combustion engine and calling every engineer in Detroit, Seoul, and Tokyo a dimwitted anti-social jerk because his 1986 Datsun was a piece of crap.

You can exaggerate it both ways. You could say that this is like someone who saw the birth of "the car" and realized that every car on the market had inferior lever-based controls in spite of his arguing for a steering wheel for decades.

[1] See http://geeks-bearing-gifts.com/gbgContents.html for summary.