For Gardner’s New Media Seminar September 23, 2010
Posted by Christina Engelbart in Collective IQ, Historic.Tags: #nmfs_10
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Thanks again to Gardner Campbell and gang for including me in his groundbreaking seminar “Awakening the Digital Imagination: A Networked Faculty Seminar” for today’s discussion based on Doug Engelbart’s 1962 seminal report Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework as a jumping off point.
The assignment for today was to read the report (abridged) in the New Media Reader textbook, which includes a fabulous 2-page intro to the article, and Janet Murray’s delightful preface Inventing the Medium.
See especially Doug’s Introduction and Conclusions.
As promised, here is my follow-up of links I referenced, and links I would have liked to have referenced.
Gardner kicked off the discussion with the final clip from 1968 Mother of All Demos where Doug acknowledges his family seated in the audience.
Re: my experience of my father’s 1968 Mother of All Demos
FYI I covered this in more detail, with more on what it was like having him for a dad, in my talk at the 40th anniversary celebration of the 1968 demo, with a sprinkling of family photos
Re: my blog on the “wibble wobble” method or
How Doug Engelbart taught kids to ride a bike (without training wheels)
Re: the Doug Engelbart Archive Collections
See the MouseSite Archive for his 1960 proposal to fund his Conceptual Framework and his 1962 letter to Vannevar Bush. See also our Archives portal page for links to archival videos, photos, papers, etc.
Re: Engelbart’s relationship with Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think”
See the MIT/Brown Tribute to Vannevar Bush (1995)
Re: the NMC as “poster child” for Bootstrapping Innovation and Collective IQ
See Bootstrapping Innovation in Action: NMC and ~ learn more ~
Tips for blogging about Doug Engelbart and his work
You can instantly copy/paste a link directly to most any snippet of information in any file at dougengelbart.org website by simply right-clicking on the nearest “purple number” in the right margin to Copy Link Location. Most pages also include a table of contents in the left margin to make it easier to find stuff. So for example, the two Engelbart readings for this class:
- Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework. 1962 (AUGMENT,3906,)
- A Research Center for Augmenting Human Intellect. 1968 (AUGMENT,3954,)
While perusing the former’s Conclusions section, I copied out the following quote, then right-clicked on it’s purple number (which are an extension of the “serial numbers” he described in this week’s reading), and copied the link to it for reference, pasted it below, and then added the italics, quote marks and “Doug Engelbart 1962″:
“First any possibility for improving the effective utilization of
the intellectual power of society’s problem solvers
warrants the most serious consideration.
This is because man’s problem-solving capability represents
possibly the most important resource possessed by a society.”
– Doug Engelbart 1962 http://dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html#6b
Just think how wonderful it would be if, anywhere on the internet (blogs, wiki, email, word processor), you could reference any snippet you see by simply right-clicking on the item selected and choosing “Create Reference” off the menu, and it supplies a copy of the snippet, in quotes, listing source author and date, with the link pointing directly to that item? This is just one of the many unfulfilled potentials of new, maleable, permeable, unbounded media he was envisioning.
For examples of student projects about Doug Engelbart’s work
See our Student Showcase, inspired by none other than Gardner Campbell 
Once again, I was honored to participate in this class discussion, and in this marvelous experiment of a walk-your-talk network of distributed faculty seminars. My appreciation extends to the NMC for all their efforts in making this “expedition” possible.
Warmly,
Christina
__________________
Christina Engelbart
Executive Director
The Doug Engelbart Institute
http://dougengelbart.org
Celebrating 65 Years of “As We May Think” August 1, 2010
Posted by Christina Engelbart in Collective IQ, Doug Engelbart Archives, Historic.Tags: Doug Engelbart Archives
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 Vannevar Bush |
This past month, July 2010, marked the 65th anniversary of the seminal article “As We May Think” by Vannevar Bush — first published in the Atlantic Monthly, in July 1945. Through this article, Bush directly and indirectly influenced the great pioneers of the information age that followed — pioneers such as Doug Engelbart, Ted Nelson, and Tim Berners-Lee.
A special symposium was held in 1995 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Bush’s article — the MIT/Brown Vannevar Bush Symposium organized by Andy van Dam. Over the course of two days, a dozen distinguished speakers reflected on Bush’s life, vision, inspiration and impact, examined what had been accomplished since, and revealed what remained to be done.
Watch the Video! Lucky for us, the Symposium was videotaped, and the complete footage of that event is now available to view online at the Internet Archive as part of the Doug Engelbart Archive – visit the Vannevar Bush Symposium Video page at the Doug Engelbart Institute website for details.
See also Simon Harper’s insightful blogpost ‘As We May Think’ at 65 « Thinking Out Loud….
More on getting beyond paper and linear media May 17, 2010
Posted by Christina Engelbart in Collective IQ.4 comments
Inspired by a recent blog by Mark Miller Getting beyond paper and linear media, May 6, 2010, here is some additional context from Doug Engelbart’s thinking.
In fact, you can find deep thinking on this theme as early as 1962 in his seminal report Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework (see esp. section II.C.4).
Doug Engelbart was convinced from the beginning that the incredible power of the human mind has been seriously under served and limited by the ways we’ve evolved to express ourselves — by our very language, and even more so by the technologies we developed throughout history for recording and making available what’s in our mind – stone tablets, scrolls, printed paper, etc. The opportunity he saw for computers was to bring us much more advanced ways to conceptualize, express, capture, store, access, and broadly share and exchange, and otherwise leverage our thinking capacity. If you want to dramatically improve how we work together to solve important problems — i.e. to boost our collective IQ, which was Doug’s goal from the start — this idea would be a great starting point in considering how computers could be harnessed to really help with that.
So for example, if I were to make the suggestion “think of your car”, you would have an instant view in your mind of your car, “now picture the interior, front seat, dash board, what’s inside your glove compartment” your mind just bombs around the information you have stored away at any level of detail, in any combination, from any vantage point, depending on what you’re thinking about at a given moment. Our minds can also make instantaneous connections between different pieces of information, sparking brand new ideas.
Pages that you scroll through don’t offer this agility. Search engines offer a bit more help, although (1) search hits typically point you to the top of a page or file, rather than directly to the piece of information you are searching on, so after you click on the link you then need to Find or Scroll your way down through the (in this moment) extraneous stuff to finally arrive at what the search engine found potentially relevant, and (2) there are typically multiple hits, and sorting through them is laborious. If the author thought ahead to put anchor points at the places which in future someone might want to link to, that could help.
Connecting information in our information spaces provides further challenges. First, there are barriers between information spaces. Second, once I find the info I’m looking for, I can’t save or share a link directly to it for the same reason the search engines can’t, so I’m generally limited to creating a link to the top of a file with pointers on how to get to the specific info. Note that I thoughtfully inserted the anchor name #Pages on the preceding paragraph, so you can send someone this link http://collectiveiq.wordpress.com/2010/05/17/more-on-getting-beyond-paper-and-linear-media/#Pages directly to that paragraph. However, it would be hard for you to know that, it’s hard to find that out on your own unless you can View Source and painstakingly read through the HTML code.
One thing that could really help would be for our tools to provide more granular addressability for us. Spreadsheet applications do this — every cell in every spreadsheet is uniquely addressable. Documents should offer the same granularity. You’ll find a crude example in Doug’s 1962 paper cited above with its “purple numbers” in the right margins; clicking on a purple number will “jump” you to that paragraph, right-clicking on it allows you to Copy Link Location directly to that paragraph to paste elsewhere (see Doug Engelbart Institute’s About Our Website).
Over the years Doug identified a set of key functional and architectural elements like granular addressability that are crucial for advancing how computers can really begin to augment rather than automate or otherwise bypass the untapped potential of our individual and collective intellect. See About an Open Hyperdocument System (OHS) for highlights and links to more detail.
Note that beyond our language and tools, the way we interface to our work can be greatly limiting our untapped potential. This interface goes beyond the usual concerns of human-computer interface (HCI — the interface to our tools), to encompass the interface to our entire work environment — i.e. to tools we use as well as the facilities, work practices, processes, methodologies, customs, attitudes, etc. invoked when we engage with each other and our information. See Doug’s paper Improving Our Ability to Improve, 2003 (esp. page 11 beginning “Another critical focus area”).
Needless to say, directions in mainstream computing since Doug’s 1968 “Mother of All Demos” were largely disappointing to Doug and his like-minded colleagues — the advent of personal computers with no provision for networking or shared knowledge spaces, office automation (why would you automate how you used to work?), desktop publishing and WYSIWYG (easy to learn is great, as long as it doesn’t also mean funneling advanced users into lowest common denominator “what you see is ALL you get” paper-based paradigms).
So what’s missing in today’s information technology? A fundamental paradigm shift. I am reminded of the Einstein quote “The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.”
For more on Doug’s vision as well as what he and his research team implemented, see the Doug Engelbart Institute website http://dougengelbart.org.
Dreams About How The World Could Be February 6, 2010
Posted by Christina Engelbart in Collective IQ, Human Interest.Tags: Collective IQ, Guest Author Series, NMC, tribute
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By guest author Gardner Campbell
Commemorating the presentation of the NMC Fellows Award to Doug Engelbart at the NMC Summer Conference. This piece excerpted for our Guest Author Series with permission from “NMC 2009 Closing Plenary: Dreams About How The World Could Be, by Gardner Campbell June 17, 2009. The sense of expectancy, of sheer possibility generated at a meeting like this make me so hopeful that we can be a force for positive change, that we can reach the transformative moment. That we can bootstrap ourselves into a better world.
Just ahead of me on a darkened stage left sits Doug Engelbart, a thinker and human being whose vision has shaped more of our information age than any other single person’s. There sits a man who has inspired me as much as John Milton has. (That’s saying something–I call my friends to bear me witness.)
| “Always, the goal was to enable us to identify, harness, and raise our collective IQ [...] to prepare us for the dangers, questions, and opportunities we would encounter as [a] civilization.” |
Now Larry Johnson has begun the tribute to Doug Engelbart. His testimony moves me deeply.
He plays excerpts from a videotaped interview he did with Doug about ten years ago. As always, the clarity and poetry of Doug’s vision take my breath away.
I’ve got to stop typing now.
The rest here is from memory, as I was too overcome with emotion on that morning to write another word as the tributes rang out.
Lev Gonick, VP for Information Technology Services at Case Western Reserve University, and Kristina Woolsey, NMC Fellow and head of Woolsey & Associates, lead Doug onto the stage. The room is instantly on its feet, applauding and cheering.
How many times does one get to thank, face to face, the inventor and visionary who has made a new vocation possible? For the work we do is a vocation, a calling, and we hear the voice of that calling through the stubborn insistence of this man’s efforts.
As we continue, quite rightly, to identify and even to rail against what’s breaking and broken in our schools, it is good also to see and remember what school at its best can be, and is: a means of augmenting human intellect, a place for bootstrapping, a place for hearts and minds to work and play together. School’s not the only place that happens. But it can happen there, and I want to help make it happen there–to preserve the fragile magic that rests upon a flawed but vital infrastructure.
In 1962, Doug Engelbart, the father of interactive computing, published a seminal essay called “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework.” The essay impressed one J.C.R. Licklider, the father of the Internet, who set Doug up with a research lab that would help bring the information age into being.
Doug was called many names during his years leading the Augmentation Research Center. Some were flattering, but many were not. He was thought by many to be (not to put too fine a point upon it) off his rocker. One early colleague warned him quite explicitly not to share his vision with anyone else lest he be fired or completely marginalized. This we know from the awed testimony of his colleagues’ speeches at last December’s celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the Mother of All Demos. Those colleagues testified to the awe they continue to feel of Doug and his achievements. They are awed by Doug’s persistence, awed by how wrong his critics were, awed to know and to have worked with someone who despite “the loneliness of the long-distance thinker,” as Howard Rheingold so aptly put it in Tools for Thought, fought through the isolation and misunderstanding and, yes, at times even antagonism and hostility, to keep his vision alive and aloft.
The ovation continues as Lev and Kristina and Doug settle into their chairs at center stage. Finally, the applause subsides, and Lev and Kristina begin to speak. They speak of Doug’s accomplishments. They recall what it was like to discover Doug’s writings, many years into their own careers, and to read their futures in the work of his heart, hands, and mind. Lev and Kristina help us understand the scale and significance of Doug’s vision. They look at him with affection, with respect. With wonder.
Several times Doug covers his face in genuine humility. Can he be the person they’re describing? Certainly he did not do his work alone. But of all the great seers and doers of the nascent information age, Doug’s achievement is the most singular, the most to be driven by a single imagination. And yet his imagination was never the point.
Always, the goal was to enable us to identify, harness, and raise our collective IQ. The idea was to augment human intellects one by one, but by means of a fine tracing of mental and spiritual connections from which would emerge a true “capability infrastructure” to prepare us for the dangers, questions, and opportunities we would encounter as civilization continues to develop and evolve.
Doug thought at scale. He understood that a car is not simply a faster tricycle. He had faith that an augmented intellect, joined to millions of other augmented intellects, could clarify individual thought even as it empowered vast new modes of thinking, new modes of complex understanding that could grasp intricately meaningful symbols as quickly and comprehensively as we can recognize a loved one’s face.
For Doug, computers are the tools we have invented in our quest for a new language, even a meta-language. A manner of speaking that can move us through the enmiring complexities of our shared lives and dreams, and thus help us to use those complex lives and dreams wisely instead of being their puppets or victims.
Lev has spoken; Kristina has spoken. Now it’s Doug’s turn.
Doug accepts his NMC Fellows Award with these words:
Well this is, you know, a trite thing to say, “I’m overwhelmed,” but I sit here just feeling overwhelmed. You know, I wasn’t doing all of those things in order to sit here and get something like this. It’s been so many years … and I still have dreams about how the world could be … anyway, I appreciate this very much, so thank you, thank you.
Afterward, these photographs:
The four NMC Fellows: (l-r) Ted Kahn, Doug Engelbart, Kristina Woolsey, Carl Berger.
Christina Engelbart, Director of the Doug Engelbart Institute, and her father, Doug Engelbart
A family triumph
About the Author: Guest author Gardner Campbell, Baylor Professor and New Media Consortium (NMC) Board Member, has an uncanny sense of articulating with poetic sincerity the very core of Doug’s vision and passion. This piece was excerpted from Gardner’s Blog entry “NMC 2009 Closing Plenary: Dreams About How The World Could Be” posted on Wednesday, June 17th, 2009 at 11:41 am. His honors course From Memex to YouTube: An Introduction to New Media Studies was the inspiration for the Doug Engelbart Institute establishing its Student Showcase. Search for “engelbart” on Gardner’s blog for more great articles about Doug and our work.
A Tribute on this Anniversary December 9, 2009
Posted by Christina Engelbart in Collective IQ, Historic.Tags: Collective IQ, mother of all demos, tribute
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Today marks the 41st anniversary of what is now known as the Mother of All Demos. On December 9th, 1968 at 3:45pm PT, my father Doug Engelbart and his research team at Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International) used the 90 minutes allotted for his speech at the Fall Joint Computer Conference to demonstrate their work live. This demo is now famous for dazzling the crowd with a whole new paradigm for computing, sparking the personal and interactive computing revolutions, the information age, etc. See selected footage of the demo on the SRI Mother of All Demos page.
In spite of the ensuing explosion of technology, we have only seen the tip of the iceberg of the vision my father was unveiling for accelerating efforts to augment human potential to solve the challenging problems we increasingly face in our lives, our communities, our organizations, our societies, our governments, and our planet. It’s this vision at the crux of all his dazzling innovative breakthroughs that is the most powerful and seminal of all his innovations.
This blog is dedicated to you, dad, and your half century of brilliant work, and to the furtherance of your vision in ways that will match or even exceed your wildest dreams, to elevate the global Collective IQ to the highest levels achievable.
With love,
Christina
For story and background, video footage, panel discussions of original participants, and more, see also on our website:
Greetings! December 8, 2009
Posted by Christina Engelbart in Collective IQ.Tags: Collective IQ
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Welcome aboard! See panel at right for a brief description of Collective IQ, and the Vision section on our website at the Doug Engelbart Institute beginning with About Collective IQ and Doug’s Vision Highlights for more in-depth background.
