On Tour with our Engelbart Scholars

Posted on April 10, 2016 by Christina Engelbart in Human Interest, Initiatives // 2 Comments

What did these Virginia Commonwealth University undergrads do for Spring Break? They toured with the Doug Engelbart Institute in the San Francisco Bay Area, joined by two professors and an embedded university librarian, for a week of hands on immersion in the Doug Engelbart legacy, including his original source archives at Stanford University, plus special site visits to the Computer History Museum, the Internet Archive, and our Dynamic Archive Initiative collaborators at Stanford and the Communications Design Group in San Francisco, CA.

Engelbart Scholar Award recipients Marina Green and Ayah Oweis on tour

The Award program and the idea for the Tour emerged from Professor Gardner Campbell‘s innovative connectivist MOOC — short for Massive Open Online Course — affectionately nicknamed Thought Vectors in Concept Space. Gardner’s innovative Thought Vectors initiative is an excellent case example of the Doug Engelbart legacy in action. More on the course and Award program in my prior blogposts listed below.

Watch this short video of last year’s Engelbart Scholars Spring Tour for a taste of the Engelbart Scholars tour experience:

Thought Vectors and Award mastermind Dr. Gardner Campbell

Meet this year’s visiting scholars:

Marina Green, Engelbart Scholar Award winner, 2015-2016, Majoring in Social Work
Ayah Oweis, Engelbart Scholar Award winner, 2015-2016, Majoring in Education and History
Gardner Campbell, Vice Provost for Learning Innovation & Student Success, and Dean, University College, as well as Assoc. Professor in English, and Mastermind of the Thought Vectors initiative
Shelli Fowler, Associate Dean, University College Director, Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies
Alice Campbell, Digital Outreach and Special Projects Librarian VCU James Branch Cabell Library

And our fabulous site visit hosts:

Henry Lowood, Curator/Historian, Stanford Libraries Special Collections at Green Library and his wonderful staff, briefed us on the Engelbart Archives at Stanford, and a case example of how they are being used in a course for Stanford students majoring in Science, Technology and Society
Marc Weber, Curator/Historian, Computer History Museum, gave us a private tour of their comprehensive Exhibit: Revolution – the First 2000 Years of Computing
Jake Feinler, Internet Pioneer Inducted in the Internet Hall of Fame, and initial Honorary Curator of the Engelbart Archives at the Computer History Museum, briefed us on the process of collecting, organizing, and making sense of this archive collection
Juho Kim and Janel Lee, Stanford Computer Science Dept, briefed us on their work with Professor Maneesh Agrawala for the Dynamic Archives Project, including Video Digest, dynamic cross linking, etc.
Brewster Kahle, Founding Director, the Internet Archive, hosted a lunch for staff and special visitors, after which he led a tour of the facility
Bret Victor, co-Founder of Communications Design Group (CDG), hosted us for a tour of their research lab and their work on the Dynamic Archives Project.
Ted Nelson, Visionary Pioneer of the Information Age and ‘Father of Hypertext’, joined us for delightful dinner and evening of discourse and demos, after which he signed Gardner and Shelli’s copies of his seminal publication Computer Lib