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79 COMPUTER TERMINALS I. Introduction The computer terminal provides the interface between a person at one point in a telecommunications network and a com- puter at another. The many and varied applications of computer systems cannot be satisfied with any one form of interface. Instead, many kinds of terminals are required to suit differ- ing needs. Some terminals must provide a printed record. Others must not print, if only because of the volume of paper which would be consumed if they did. In some situations it is suffi- cient to reproduce alphanumerical text. Others require images of one sort or another. For some applications it is enough that the text be readable, permitting the characters to be created from a rectangular array of dots. Other uses, such as prepara- tion of masters for photo-offset printing, require high standards of contrast and elegance. There are applications which require a display in color. The presentation of an electrocardiogram for clinical analysis may require a display having high fidelity for detail. Mechanical design demands a degree of rectilinear fidelity which most applications do not. Some terminals must provide positive identification of one or two users, as when recording a retail sale. There are applications which require simulated speech, while others would be enhanced by the ability to recog- nize speech. Taking all of these needs into account, it seems probable that a few terminal types will be produced in large volume for common use. At the same time there will be developed a large number of terminal types to meet more specialized needs. Possibly the most useful terminal of all would be created if each telephone were equipped with a full alphanumeric touch- tone keyboard. Such a keyboard used with a simulated voice response from the computer would fill a great variety of needs, from making airline reservations to placing off-track bets.
80 II. Consequences of Large Scale Integration of Electronic Circuitry The advent of large scale integration of electronic cir- cuitry (LSI) is certain to have a profound effect upon the nature of computer terminals. It has been predicted that it will soon be possible to include on a single chip the entire circuitry of a computer more powerful than those which only recently sold for as much as a million dollars, and that the manufacturing cost of such a chip may be less than that of a typewriter. If these predictions are fulfilled, there will be little need for telecommunications to time-share a computer. The existence of computing and memory capabilities within the terminal opens up new design possibilities. There are, for example, partially electronic keyboard and printer mechanisms which may be less costly and more reliable than the mechanisms used in present typewriters. Possibly the inclusion of an LSI chip in a typewriter will reduce the cost of its mechanical parts sufficiently to offset the cost of the chip. If so, all typewriters soon may become electronic computers. The inclusion of a chip in a computer terminal radically alters the relative attractiveness of possible components. For example, it tends to diminish or eliminate any advantage which a display device with inherent memory might otherwise have over other devices which do not have this attribute. III. Electronic Writing Machine The proposed new terminals with LSI componentry are becoming known as "intelligent terminals," as opposed to the present "idiot" devices. While their advent will have a pro- found effect on many computer applications, the example of an electronic writing machine will serve to illustrate what lies ahead. Present-day typewriters are little different in concept from the device into which Samuel Clemmons sank a fortune. The single step of including an LSI chip may alter the character of the device and its use as profoundly as everything which has been done to it up to now. Providing the electronic writing machine with computing capabilities and a memory large enough to hold a document makes it possible to edit and correct the text of the document until
81 a completely satisfactory version has been achieved. In this way an unskilled typist can produce perfect results. The electronic writing machine becomes a useful tool for a much larger number of people than today can use a typewriter. Further, it may be possible for a skilled typist to enter text in a personal shorthand like that which radio operators use. An entry such as "u r gog to b talr" might be reproduced in the final copy as "You are going to be taller." For a skilled individual, the ability to use such a shorthand might very significantly increase working efficiency. In addition, the electronic writing machine might include an acoustical coupler to connect it to the telephone for tele- communications, in this way making it a computer terminal. As an example of the use of the coupler, the writer of a letter might, after completing it, telephone the post office and send the letter to the recipient's "mail box." This would be a data bank where it would remain until the recipient chooses to use his own electronic writing machine to "look in his mail box." Such mail may become the first class mail of the future, with present air mail being relegated to second-class status. As well as being faster, electronic mail of this kind may ultimately be less costly than physically moving printed documents. IV. Information Sharing One should not conclude from these remarks that the advent of intelligent terminals will reduce the need for telecommunica- tions. Quite the opposite is true. Our society is increasingly dependent on information-sharing systems - radio, TV, mail, news- papers, schools, libraries, and merchandising serve as examples. By contrast to the vast flow of information, the amount of com- puting which is done for its own sake is very small. Computers are increasingly being used for information processing, as opposed to computation. Time will prove the computer to have been misnamed. Similarly, telecommunications for time-sharing the computing power of a large computer will be replaced by telecommunications for information-sharing. Many large data banks will evolve to serve the needs of our increasingly information-dependent society. Because of the cost of maintaining such data banks, and particularly the cost of keeping the information in them up to date, there will tend to be a single bank for each given body of material. The people
82 of the world will share in its use via satellite. Generally speaking, information is blind to geographic and political boun- daries. It is increasingly blind to the language differences of the people of the world as English evolves as the common language of communication among all people. Although many data banks will be available to everyone, there may develop around each of them a faculty specializing in its maintenance and use. As an example of this, we probably are approaching the time when census processing for most developing nations will be accomplished at a central point to insure that the census data from the individual countries can be fitted together for study of worldwide trends. This center probably will be located either in New York City or in Geneva. Around it will develop a pool of individuals who are expert in census taking and census interpretation. The initial choice of location for this data bank may establish where the center of census know- ledge will be a century from now. It has been observed that Lloyds of London did much to offset an otherwise negative trade balance for England for many years. In each case in which the United States takes the leader- ship in establishing a fundamental data bank useful to the world as a whole, it will be taking a step toward leadership in that field for many years to come. There frequently will be important secondary benefits to derive from the existence of a data bank. If the United States has the pharmaceutical data bank to which the rest of the world looks, the chance that the Pharmaceuticals themselves will be purchased in the United States will be greater than would be the case if the data bank were abroad, and in another language. V. Areas Needing Government-Funded Research The computer terminal market is and probably will continue to be competitive and profitable. As a consequence, there should be little need for government funds to assist it in evolving. There are, however, aspects of terminal design of great im- portance which are not likely to get the attention of terminal manufacturers. These relate primarily to the efficient transfer of information between a person and a terminal. The following questions will serve to indicate the range of inquiry which is needed.
83 l) If tens of millions of students are to spend an hour or more a day before a computer terminal, what can be done to maximize the rate and ease of information transfer? 2) If it is our goal to have as many as possible of the people of the world use our data banks, what can be done to lower the level of English which they must learn to do so? 3) Do computer terminals need both capital and lower case letters? What would be gained and lost if only one form of character were used? 4) Do we need all of the characters in our present alpha- bet? How about Q? Would we gain or lose from adding charac- ters representing sounds such as ch and th? 5) Would there be less visual ambiguity among the charac- ters of the alphabet if one or more were given new forms? 6) Would learning our language be easier if its orthography and pronunciation were more closely related? 7) Are words like "queue" relics which should be disposed of? Why not spell it Q? The word "eskimos" was spelled "esquimaux" only a few years ago. 8) What color is most suitable for a display? Could we improve the readability of a display by using more than one color, as for example one color for consonants, another for vowels, and a third for punctuation? We tend to think of anyone interested in the simplifica- tion of the English language as being a crackpot, although such people share some good company. Possibly the people who have been concerned with the subject in the past have not been daring enough. Certainly the potential gains increase as more people are obliged to learn English as a second language. A second area which may deserve government funds is speech synthesis. One's ears are entry ports to the brain which are today little used for the transfer of computer information. As already noted, there would be important uses for synthetic speech, if it were available in a more usable form. The vocabulary should be unlimited, and the speech easily intelligible.
84 It should be possible to create speech directly from alpha- numerical data in digital form within a computer data bank. This would, as an example, allow a technical journal in a library data bank to be read to a blind person. Such a system would open up to the blind many careers which do not exist for them today. S. W. Dunwell IBM Corporation Poughkeepsie, N.Y.
85 FUTURE USE OF COMMUNICATIONS AND TERMINALS IN EDUCATION I. Introduction This study speculates on the future uses of communi- cations and computer terminals in education and the demands which these uses will make upon the terminal, the computer, and the communication link between them. The time is the year l979 and beyond. Formal education in the United States and in Europe has gone through several decades of growth along relatively con- sistent and well-defined lines. We now see changes taking place at a much more rapid rate as education struggles to adapt itself to the changing needs of society. It seems probable that the remainder of the century will witness more change in education than has occurred in any comparable period in the past. Up to the present time, teaching methods have been dictated to a greater degree than we may realize by the lack of the tools necessary for automation. The major tool has been the book, the use of which has been progressively refined over the centuries since the invention of movable type. Today we have new tools which permit changes of great magnitude. Audio tape, film and videotape, television and computer ter- minals all offer themselves as new dimensions in the educa- tional process. Each of these technologies is in a state of rapid development which promises lower costs, wider availa- bility and new capabilities. II. Social Environment of Education Since the changes which are taking place in education are largely in response to changes in society, our considera- tion of the use of computer terminals and communications will commence with an examination of the social environment of education. All of the things which will be observed here already have been discussed widely in recent publications. They are being restated because they serve as the basis of the conclusions to be reached later on in this study. A, Cost of Teaching Personnel The largest single element in the cost of education has always been that of the teaching personnel. Until a few decades ago teachers were poorly paid, which minimized the incentive to improve teacher efficiency. More recently, teachers' wages have been increasing with little offsetting
86 improvement in the number of students whom each teacher can serve. A major challenge for the automation of teaching is to improve the teaching efficiency of our educational institutions, so that higher wages can be paid while at the same time reducing the over-all cost of education. B. Cost of Space The second largest cost element in education has been the cost of construction, maintenance, and debt service for the educational plant. The amount of space per student has tended to remain relatively constant, since it has been dictated by teaching methods. Our growing population and the freedom with which migration occurs from one area to another have required a large amount of school construction. This has occurred during a period of rapidly increasing construction costs. The space used by schools is largely living space, and is correspondingly expensive. It must have its temperature controlled and must be well lighted. There must be reasonable quiet. It must be possible to work in comfort. Schools use their space a relatively short part of the time. For public schools, the school year is usually less than 200 days. During the remaining nearly 50% of the year the space may be com- pletely unused. While colleges and universities sometimes do better than public schools in the use of space during the day, the latter typically occupy their classrooms for not more than six to seven hours. Moreover, by the time a student reaches the junior high school level he should have a study space at home, in addition to the space which he occupies at school. Taken all together, this extravagant use of space for education is possible only in a society which has reason- ably well provided housing for its members. Similar provisions can not be made in many developing countries of the world where living space is at a much greater premium than in the United States. C. Time as a Measure of Learning At one time it was the practice to apprentice a student to a master for a stated space of time duing which the student was expected to learn what he could from the master. From then until now time has been one of the principal measures of learning. Nearly all educational institutions establish a fixed period, the semester or term, within which each course must fit, regardless of the nature of its material. It is uncommon for a course to take either less or more than this amount of time, except that a course may occupy two or more consecutive terms.
87 It is obvious that all subjects do not require equal lengths of time to master. It is also obvious that students with differing abilities and backgrounds will require different amounts of time to cover the same body of material. Clearly, fitting many different kinds of course material into periods of like duration does not serve the needs of either the subject matter or the students. It is designed to fit the limitations of the system. D. Education as a Life-Long Process At an earlier time when the rate of social and economic change and the scope and rate of growth of human knowledge were less, it was possible to educate young people with the reasonable probability that the knowledge imparted would be appropriate and sufficient to their use for the remainder of their lives. This is no longer true. We must look upon edu- cation as a life-long process for the members of our society who are to remain fully functional as they grow older. Since it is impractical for most adults to interrupt the pattern of their lives for one or more consecutive years to return full time to schools of the present kind, it is going to be necessary to offer them education wherever they are, at what- ever times of the day or night they are free, and at a pace in keeping with their abilities and portion of their lives which they can afford to devote to continuing education. E. Adapting Education to Individual Ability & Background Courses today are in general designed for students of like background and ability. Any student who is very far outside the norm is poorly served. As the portion of edu- cation devoted to adults increases, the range of background and ability found within a "class" will correspondingly widen, emphasizing the need to adapt the scope and pace of the educational process to individual needs. F. Requirement of a High School or College Degree Our society is placing increasing emphasis on high school and college degrees as requirements for employment and promotion. It has been observed that Thomas Edison did not have the education to meet the minimum requirements for employment as an IBM engineer. Mr. Thomas Watson, Sr. lacked the college degree demanded today of an IBM sales trainee. The Wright brothers, Henry Ford and Charles Kettering all lacked the sort of education which we would consider today to be necessary for the kinds of work they did so well. It is also clear that organizations very often make a certain level of education a requirement for employment, even
88 though the requirement has little or no relevance to the needs of the job. It is sufficiently evident that this works against an equal sharing of opportunity so that we are seeing pressure to remove the requirement of a high school or college diploma as a condition for employment where it has no direct bearing on the work to be done. We are also seeing greater use of equivalency certificates as an alternate to diplomas. G. Ancillary Services - Busing, Lunch, Sports In order to provide more uniform and broader educational programs, our educational institutions have tended to grow in size and reduce in number. Bringing students together in large numbers in this way has forced schools to enlarge the scope of the services which they provide to include services unrelated to education. There are public school districts within New York State which operate over one hundred buses, many times the number of buses available to serve the general population in the same area. In general, these transportation systems tend to lock the school system into a rigid schedule which is difficult to change. The coming and going of his bus is a major determinant of what each student can accomplish during a day. Similarly, schools usually manage large lunch programs, sometimes serving more people than the public restaurant facilities available within the school district. The provision of transportation and lunch for students places a considerable strain on the system. Management attention must be devoted to supervision of these services and space must be provided, all of which dilutes the attention to education. For many districts the burden of school taxes is so great as to leave little money to provide for transportation, library service, sports facilities and auditorium space for general public use. At the same time, the use of the facilities pro- vided to the schools is proscribed to exclude the adult tax- payers who support the facilities. The school buses are not available for them to ride, they are not free to stop at the school lunch room for a meal, they may not borrow books from the school library, the gymnasium is closed to them, and they do not have free access to the school as a public meeting place. Unless the district is wealthy enough to duplicate these facilities, the adult taxpayer is deprived of what he has bought H. The Information Explosion The range and scope of human knowledge are growing at a rapid rate. There are many important fields in which it is impossible for any human being to keep himself well informed. Instead, each of us is forced to be increasingly selective in what we learn.
89 At the same time, everyone is exposed to a wider range of information than ever before. Even those who are func- tionally illiterate are learning a great deal about the world and its people through such media as radio, TV and travel. For those who can and do read, the range of subject matter available in books and periodicals has never before been so great. I. The World as School The physical world and the society in which each person lives serves as a school which will teach him most of what he ever learns. No amount of time in class would have taught Darwin what he learned from his trip on the Beagle. It seems unlikely that Picasso's work would be improved by art courses, or that Abraham Lincoln's speaking style would have been enhanced by a course in rhetoric. There are boundaries beyond which only the real world and society at large can serve as teachers. In general schools are surrogates for real life, institu- tions which make learning easier by bringing together in con- venient proximity people and materials conducive to learning and provide an environment free of distractions. While it is obvious that schools serve these purposes very well under favorable conditions, life teaches us that there is no sub- stitute for contact with the real world and that for many kinds of subject matter school is second best to real life. The student who must learn from life may be privileged, and not under-privileged. As an example, all of us learn a language at an early age. Most of us learn it more easily and better than we ever learn another language using the methods employed in school. III. What the Future Holds If one is willing to accept the preceding observations as reasonably representing the environment in which education finds itself today, it is possible to proceed to certain speculations as to the changes which may occur. A. Teaching How to Learn, to Work and to Communicate There is no way in which in the time available our young people can be given a comprehensive grasp of the factual information represented by such disciplines as history, physical and political geography, mathematics, science, language and anthropology. Consequently, one of the goals of our educa- tional system must be to teach them how to learn, how to be effective, and how to communicate with others. They must be
90 taught as early as possible to read, to write, to speak lucidly, to think logically, and to perform arithmetic and other essential mathematical processes. They must be taught how to obtain needed information, how to organize their work, how to work with others, both as leader and as subordinate, and to observe the world and society around them. They must learn how the local and larger communities operate, and what these communities offer and expect of them. By the time the student has reached the secondary school level, schools in their present form serve these needs poorly. Much of what the student needs to learn can be mastered better through closer contact with the community than in the class- room. It is reasonable to expect that in the future more of education at the secondary and college level will be accom- plished through institutions in the community, or through student projects organized and executed by one or several young people. In this way the community and the students themselves will assume more of the responsibility for their education. We can expect to see students deeply involved in work with local institutions, including the judiciary, welfare, community development and the communications media - news- papers, radio and TV. More young people will do creative work at an early age in such fields as art, mathematics, science and anthropology. Much of their time may be spent in these activities, and less than today spent in the present kind of classroom instruction. A single example will serve to illustrate how this may come about. Cablevision services are required by the FCC to set aside a channel for educational purposes. It may turn out that the management of this channel will fall into the hands of the students in a community, with students in each of the secondary and higher institutions providing materials for viewing by the community at large. Such channels might provide a refreshing contrast to what one sees today on commercial TV. The time required for activities of this sort will become available in several ways. In part, it may be obtained by using new teaching techniques such as Computer-Assisted Instruc- tion to improve learning efficiency. Replacement of the present rigidly scheduled school day with a more flexible program in which each student's schedule is more nearly fitted to his own needs can also give him more time for his own use. Finally, it is to be expected that schools will abandon any attempt to teach large bodies of factual materials, such as "world history,' and substitute more manageable courses designed to interest the student in a subject area and to teach him how to make it a part of his life.
91 B. Education in the Home To a much greater extent than is true today, education may take place within the home. At the primary school level, students may continue to spend about as much time in school as they do today because of the extent to which primary schools are relied upon for social conditioning and as daytime foster parents for our children. However, as children grow older and become more responsible for themselves they may spend less and less learning time in school and more such time studying at home, at neighborhood learning centers, or elsewhere in the community. It is possible that at the college level much more learning will take place off campus with a reduction in classroom activities and with greater dependence on conferences between instructor and student and occasional group meetings to maintain personal contact. C. Videophone Classroom It may be that in the future an instructor and his class will meet through videophone or its equivalent, with the students and possibly the instructor as well remaining in their own homes. This would have the virtue of eliminating commuting time for all involved, and would allow a "class" to reside over a much wider area than is possible today. This in turn would permit an institution to offer a wider choice of courses, and to offer them at a greater choice of times to meet the differing needs of an increasingly adult student body. A videophone classroom could operate in the following way: Each student might have a TV viewer which would connect by a "telephone" line to the school. When time for the course arrives, the student would dial the school and the course. A "telephone" exchange at school would connect to- gether the TV viewers for all members of the class. They would be able to see one another on a split-image screen, but would hear only the instructor. By pressing a button, a student could cause his image to flash on the instructor's screen and so signal that he wishes to be heard. More simply, he might hold up his hand or otherwise signal by physical means. The instructor's viewer alone might have the ability to deter- mine which member of the class, if any, is to be heard. A system of this kind is simple in concept, and should not be expensive in relation to its utility. The saving in expense and time of travel alone for students might be suffici- ent to justify its cost.
92 D. Certificates of Mastery The present use of course credits as a record of scholas- tic accomplishment may diminish in favor of certification that an individual has reached a certain level of mastery of a specific body of material without regard to the manner in which the knowledge was acquired. A student may not need to have attended an institution to obtain certification from it in one or more areas. For a person who has grown up in another country, certification of proficiency in the language of that country might be very easy to obtain. The ability to make certifications in this manner would depend upon there being a detailed definition of the subject matter for which certification is being given. This could be done much more readily in some subject areas such as mathematics or pharmacy than in others, such as creative writing. Similarly, the ability to certify competency in this way depends upon being able to test exhaustively an individual's mastery of a subject. Computer terminals can be of great assistance in this, since they make it possible to test much more thoroughly and accurately than is possible using present manual testing methods. When a student fails a certification test, he might be provided with an analysis of his strengths and weaknesses and with a prescription for the measures which he might take to improve him sufficiently to qualify. If he passes the test, he might be told what to do to qualify for the next higher proficiency level in the same subject area. The student might be able to take the certification test, or selected parts of it, again and again during his studies. In this way, the testing might give direction to his work. Each retest could pick up where the previous one left off, and so cover only those areas which remain in doubt. In this way the testing could be exhaustive and accurate, and at the same time unrepetitive and rewarding to the student. E. Computer-Assisted Instruction Computer-assisted instruction (CAI) is basically a dia- log between a student and a computer, with the computer side of the dialog having been programmed by a teacher. Since the computer responses have been created by the teacher, the quality of the dialog depends upon the teacher's ability to anticipate the student's actions and program responses appropriate to them. CAI promises to be of great value as a way of individualizing instruction without the need for human instructors. Depending on the nature of the material being taught, the control over the direction which the dialog takes may in one
93 case rest primarily with the student and in another rest primarily with the computer acting under the direction of the author of the CAI course. For the computer to guide the course of the dialog, it must have some past history of the student's level of perform- ance on the CAI course material, or it may be the results of prior testing. To this extent, testing and CAI can be made to augment one another. Completion of a CAI course may carry with it certification of mastery of the subject. F. Television and Cablevision The use of film and of guest lecturers for teaching is rapidly increasing, but usually in a rather haphazard way. Attending such an event is often inconvenient to the student because of the time at which it is scheduled and because of the need to commute to it. It is reasonable to expect that in time cablevision channels committed to education will provide a rich fare of films and lectures which the student can view in his home. Videotape is becoming more reliable and less costly to use, and it is predictable that a guest lecturer in a community may have his lecture taped and repeated several times for the viewing convenience of students. Teachers may choose to videotape their lectures. This would allow them to polish their presentations, and would free them of the need to cover the same material again and again. The lecture could be shown more than once over a period of several days to ensure that everyone including employed adults has an opportunity to view it. The tape could be made at the time most convenient to the teacher, thereby allowing him to be free of the institution a greater part of the time. Videotape (and film to a lesser degree because of its higher cost and the greater technical difficulty of producing it) should be recognized as important new media of expression for students as well as faculty. It is reasonable to expect that students will use videotape as a medium for presentation of thesis materials, and that in general much of the videotape programming presented by an institution will have been prepared by students. G. Remote Reference to a Library Catalog It may be possible for a student to interrogate a library catalog from a computer terminal in his home. Where there are several libraries in a community, their contents may be listed in a single combined catalog. The catalog may indicate whether the document is in the stacks or on loan, and in the latter case when it is due to be returned. It also may be
94 possible for a student to reserve documents, and to have them delivered to a place from which he can conveniently pick them up. This might be the neighborhood learning center nearest his home. H. Remote Reference to Documents It may be possible for an instructor to arrange to have selected reference documents made available by videophone, by display, or printing computer terminal for use by students. In this way, a single copy of a document might serve many students without the need for them to visit a library for the purpose. While one would like to accomplish this by direct video viewing of the original document, an intermediate step in this direction would be to enter the contents of a document into the computer as data which the student might view or retrieve at will. In the course of time much of the contents of our libraries may be stored in digital form, and so be available at all times to every student. I. Computer Document Editing A computer terminal can be a very useful tool in the preparation of texts, reports, student essays and documents of many kinds. The original of this document was prepared using a computer terminal in this way without the assistance of a typist. The value of the computer lies in the ease with which changes can be made in a document as one proceeds from the first rough draft to its finished form. One can freely make changes, additions and deletions in the text and then ask the computer to produce a new clean copy incor- porating them. Repeated manual retyping is avoided, and a level of perfection can be achieved that is difficult to attain if each change, no matter how small, requires retyping to obtain a clean copy. The assumption is made that all serious students from the junior high school level up will be able to type. The ease with which typing errors can be corrected makes it possible for a typist with limited skill to produce good results. J. Computation and Data Processing The computer terminal is, of course, ideal for compu- tation and data processing. Using a high-level language such as APL, students from possibly the fifth grade up will have full access to the computer for computation and data
95 processing studies. This will permit them to undertake studies requiring larger amounts of computation and data processing than it is possible to accomplish by hand. Data banks will be available for student use. These might, for example, contain census data which the student could use for independent data processing studies. In this way, high school and college students may be able to undertake studies of a significance which in the past has been expected only of graduate students. K. Multi-Media Teaching As new media for teaching become available they may tend to augment rather than replace earlier media as teaching tools. A typical course may employ several media appropriate to its goals. In addition to lectures and books, on which many courses place exclusive reliance today, a course may employ videophone classes, films, videotapes or lectures on cablevision, computer-assisted instruction, video reference to information in the library, and use of computer terminals for computation, data retrieval and document preparation. L. Passive as Opposed to Dynamic Teaching Methods In general, films, videotape and audiotape have been less effective as teaching devices than at first was expected of them. To a degree, the limited effectiveness of these media is because they fail to involve the student as directly as classroom and computer-assisted instruction are able to do. If the student's interest flags, it is easier for him to let his thoughts drift or to go asleep over a book or in front of TV than would be the case in a well-run classroom. During computer-assisted instruction the process immediately comes to a halt when the student stops responding. It is foreseen that future teaching methods will aim to involve the student directly and continuously, and whereever possible to put the direction of the teaching process in his hands. There are many subjects for which the order in which the individual elements are learned is of little importance. For them it may be quite satisfactory for the student to guide himself as long as subsequent testing
96 insures that sooner or later he grasps all of the essentials of the subject. Foreign languages are excellent examples of such subject matter. IV. The Future Form and Function of Educational Institutions The new teaching media may bring about major changes in the form and function of colleges and universities and some- what less change in primary and secondary schools. Instead of living at school or commuting to it, the student may satisfy a larger part of his needs through communication. The institution may become a communication center and a resource repository which its faculty and students visit less frequently than today. Much less physical plant may be required and what there is may be dispersed throughout the community. The drawing radius of an institution may be many times what it is today, where the influence of an educational institution tends to be limited by the distance over which its students can commute. As in so many aspects of present-day society, bigness will be a virtue. The larger the institution, the greater the scope of the subj.ect matter it can offer and the larger the resources it can support. The investment in library facilities, computers, video equipment, etc., will be great, with the result that the cost per student for these facili- ties can be kept at a reasonable level only by having the institution very large. Small institutions will be forced to share facilities with one another. Bigness may not be the disadvantage it is today if the student is free to work on his own much of the time. While the greater physical distance separating the instructor and his students may to some degree reduce the feeling of personal contact, the skillful use of the videophone may do much to mitigate this and may, in fact, make personal con- tact more readily possible than it is in reality today for most students. Subject matter may tend to be offered in smaller units and repeated more frequently. Those subjects which can be accommodated by computer-assisted instruction may be contin- uously available. Graduation from an institution may have less meaning than it has today. Depending on the nature of his studies, a student may complete his program at any time during the year. There may be an inherent assumption that the student will at some time in the future resume his studies at the same or a different institution. Graduation would carry
97 with it certification of a certain level of mastery of a list of subject areas. Through continued study after graduation the student might add to this list year by year throughout his lifetime. V. Large Scale Integration of Computer Circuitry (LSI) We are rapidly reaching a point where very large amounts of computer circuitry occupy very little space and cost very little to produce. Moreover, such circuitry performs very reliably. This brings us to the threshhold of a major technological revolution which in time will affect a great many of the electrical and mechanical devices and appliances which we are accustomed to using. We already have seen electronic hand calculators replace their mechanical predecessors. The new electronic calcu- lators are easier to use, less costly, more versatile and more reliable. They are better in every way. Polaroid has employed LSI in its latest camera. LSI is about to dramatically reduce the cost of computers and at the same time increase their power. It promises to revolutionize telephone systems, and communications systems in general. The sections which follow presuppose the rapid application of LSI in many fields. VI. Electronic Typewriter It seems probable that the typewriter will be one of the next devices to which LSI electronics will be applied. Doing so will have several far reaching consequences. First of all, the use of electronics will permit a less complicated printing mechanism to be used. Simplifying the mechanical structure will at the same time reduce weight and cost, and improve reliability and maintainability. The reduction in the cost of mechanical parts alone may be sufficient to cover the cost of the LSI electronics. The new printing mechanisms will be able to operate at several times the speed of present typewriters. While this will not influence the speed with which manual typing can be done, it will permit the typewriter to be more effective as an automatic typing machine. Once electronics has been introduced into the type- writer, it will cost very little more to add memory, the ability to compute and execute computer programs, and the facilities to communicate over telephone lines with other computers and data banks. The typewriter is about to become a computer in its own right able to perform extensive and complex computations. It will be able to do data processing on limited amounts of data.
98 The existence of memory and data processing facilities within the typewriter will allow it to be used for document editing. As a document is typed, the data will be stored in the memory of the typewriter. After completion of entry it will be possible to make corrections and revisions at will without retyping the complete text to do so. When the text is complete and satisfactory, it will be possible to print it at several times the speed of present typewriters. The ability to communicate over the telephone will make the typewriter a computer terminal. It may be in this way that we see computer terminals entering the home and becoming as ubiquitous as typewriters are today. Since the typewriter will have computing ability within itself, it will not be necessary to time-share the computational facilities of a large computer for tasks of ordinary dimensions. The com- munications facilities will be used primarily for information gathering and information sharing. The computer to which the connection is made usually will be a data bank of one kind or another. VII. Learning Center Equipment We will now examine the electronic equipment requirements for a future learning center. This center may be in a home, it may be a neighborhood center serving many students, or it may be on the campus of an educational institution. When off campus, it would serve secondary and college level students and adults continuing their education. The learning center would have one or more television sets. These would provide access to educational channels on cablevision. In addition, they should be capable of being connected to the video classroom facilities of a number of educational institutions to permit students to participate in a wide selection of courses of this kind. The learning center would provide one or more computer terminals. Some of these might be the electronic typewriters already described. Others might provide, in addition, a dis- play screen to permit graphic data to be presented. This would also allow data in character representation to be pre- sented at a much more rapid rate than any mechanical printer can do, and would be particularly useful for scanning purposes, such as searching library reference files. When the day comes that the computer can speak with a large vocabulary we will wish the terminal to have audio communication capabilities. This would be extremely useful for foreign language instruc- tion. Learning centers will make some use of film and audio and video tape. However, the technical problems involved in dis- tributing these media are such that much of the material
99 available in these forms may be offered on a scheduled basis, or on request over cable TV and cable radio circuits. Audio tape will continue to be used in the manner it now is for language laboratories. We probably will see much more common use of audio tapes for the kinds of instruction which do not require the full attention of the student. A good example is language tapes designed to sharpen the student's auditory perception of a foreign language. These can be used rather casually in a learning center, at home, or while driving a car. It is often suggested that television will be married to the electronic typewriter as a way of producing a device with keyboard and display capabilities. While this may come about, few educational uses have a direct need for the unique feature of TV, which is its ability to present motion. Motion implies a much wider bandwidth for the communication link to the terminal. This probably will dictate that the display device normally present a static image. This does not preclude the rather rapid scanning of data, but avoids such a flow of data from being a continuous requirement of the terminal. VIII. Electronic Libraries Computers and electronic typewriters soon will be almost universally used for the preparation of text for publication. The old method using linotype and galley proofs already is obsolete because of the time and cost of making changes and corrections. As a consequence, nearly all printed material will be available in electronic digital form suitable for storage in data banks. It is evident that no one educational institution can accommodate in its libraries physical copies of the flood of publications of interest to its constituency. Instead, there may be a reliance on large data banks as libraries, with the entire contents always immediately available to everyone. The libraries of educational institutions may be used pri- marily as repositories for old books and for publications in common demand. In order to make an electronic library practical, it will be necessary to have a means for storing data at very low cost which at the same time permits rapid automatic retrieval. Such a means of storage is the remaining missing link which precludes the rapid development of vast data banks for many purposes, of which the electronic library is only one. At the present time, the annual cost of operating a library usually exceeds that of the publications purchased. By automating the handling of the publications, the electronic library may reduce very substantially the cost of libraries.
100 The information provided by an electronic library would be available to the user on a display device, or might be printed if the amount of data is not too great. For many uses, this method of obtaining access to published informa- tion will not be as convenient as the books, magazines and journals we use today. The electronic library may be most useful for research and reference purposes. It may do little to stem the flow of printed matter of the kind we now use. IX. Mature of the Computer Data Bank Since computer terminals will provide substantial com- puting capability, it seems probable that in the field of education large computers will be used primarily to manage data banks and communication. Data banks will grow enor- mously in size as we draw into them much information now stored in printed form or on microfilm. Some of the stored information may be on rotating magnetic disks or similar devices for rapid access. Much more will be stored pas- sively on tape or similar media, but with the ability to be recalled automatically on short notice. The passive storage will probably be digital rather than a photographic image to facilitate data management and transmission. Storage density will be very high, on the order of that of microfilm. Consequently, vast amounts of information will be stored economically and at the same time will be available quickly. While certain data banks will be maintained by educa- tional institutions, many will be managed by consortia, and others will be national or international in nature. As an example, a single data bank might serve to store vast amounts of information relating to a class of plants or animals. X. Communications Three levels of communication seem to be required between the learning center and an educational institution. One of these would be for educational broadcasts, and should be amply served by one or more educational channels on cablevision wherever it exists. A second requirement is for data communication between terminals and computers. This is comfortably within the bandwidth of present local voice telephone circuits, and it is probable that such facilities will be used to meet near- term needs. A single telephone voice circuit between a neighborhood learning center and a school may have sufficient
101 data carrying capacity to serve many student terminals. When a terminal in one central office area must communicate with a computer in another central office area, it seems probable that the communication between central offices will be taken care of by specialized circuitry modified for the efficient handling of digital data. This should allow many terminals to share simultaneously the equivalent of a single voice circuit and so make long distance digital data communication very much less costly than corresponding voice communication. The video classroom introduces a third and more severe communication requirement. It corresponds to that of the videophone system which the telephone industry is preparing to provide. The educational application for videophone may, in fact, provide the greatest single incentive for making such service available in the near future. Because of its cost, video classroom service is not likely to be commonly available in home learning centers for some time. The cost per user diminishes considerably for neighborhood learning centers, since a number of users presumably could share a single circuit to an educational institution. It appears that each educational institution will have communications links at all three of these levels to other institutions in order to share cablevision and video class- room offerings, computers and data banks. XI. Telephone Equipment A number of electronic telephone central offices have been installed. None of these have as yet taken advantage of the current revolution in LSI circuitry. As this occurs, there should follow the same dramatic improvement in per- formance and reduction in cost that are expected in the com- puter industry. In view of the vast amount of telephone central office equipment in existence, it is not reasonable to expect that this will occur very quickly. Except for meeting the increasing voice, data and video demand with microwave and satellite communication links, there may be little change in the character of the communica- tions system between central offices. Similarly, the present system of twisted pair circuits which serves to connect tele- phones and terminals to the central office in an area may for some time remain as they are. The use of pulse code modula- tion together with digital error-correcting repeaters is capable of greatly increasing the information carrying capa- bility of twisted-pair telephone lines. This could signifi- cantly raise the level of local data service which can be provided without replacement of the present wire system with coaxial cable.
102 Possibly at some future time there will be a single broad-band circuit into each home to serve all of its communications needs. The implementation of any such system presupposes the discarding of the present system of local circuits and central exchanges. Whether it will take place in a given area as a single giant step, through the development of competing systems serving the same area, or through a separate parallel system which gradually supplants the present one is hard to predict. XII. The Human Element Anyone contemplating for the first time the future uses of electronic equipment in education discussed here may wonder if it will not have a dehumanizing effect. This need not necessarily be the case. In certain respects the mail, radio, television, film, publications and the telephone all diminish human contact. In other respects they increase the possibilities for rewarding contact and allow us to lead more satisfactory lives. If we go about restructuring our educational system in a sensible way, it should be possible to remove many impedi- ments to education and to free the student and the teacher to make better use of their time and of the contacts between them. Reduction in the amount of travel needed to study, elimination of the need to sit through class discussions of material that one already understands, access to vast libraries of information, the ability to share in videoclass discussion with people scattered over a wide geographical area, access to data banks and large computers can all serve to provide a better education and at the same time allow the student to do more on his own. S. W. Dunwell IBM Corporation Poughkeepsie, N. Y.
