Hello folks, I’m Liza Loop, Vision Keeper for KEPLAIR. In this post I’ll tell you just a little about the origins of the KEPLAIR vision.
I probably first read George Leonard’s Education and Ecstasy shortly after it was published in 1968 (Delacorte Press). The computer enhanced school it describes in the opening pages was fantasy then. We could have made it happen by now (2021) but the education establishment took a different turn, preferring to simulate traditional classrooms rather than reimagine what support systems we would be able to build for human learning.
In 1975 I opened LO*OP Center, a storefront computer center in Cotati, CA. LO*OP, which stands for Learning Options * Open Portal, was loosely modeled after Bob Albrecht’s People’s Computer Center in Menlo Park, CA. Both organizations welcomed kids and adults to explore computers at their own pace. Visitors could play games, take courses in computer programming, rent time to do their own business on the center’s computers, and hang out with friends. At that time there were very few computers in homes and the microprocessors that are now used to make all new appliances “smart” had just been invented. There was almost no software and any “apps” only ran on huge, company-owned mainframes. You certainly couldn’t download them onto a home machine – – or a telephone? Don’t even think of it.
Actually, many of us did think about these things and how we might use the new technologies to supplement what was going on in schools became a hot topic. During this same period, the communications infrastructure we now know as the Internet was being pioneered.
By 1983, lots of homes, schools and libraries had computers that could run games and applications from programs stored on tape or diskettes making it possible to use them like interactive books for remote teaching. A few of these computers were connected to large information storage facilities via the internet and some of those were even connected to each other. That’s when I first wrote down the idea for LearningQuest, then called: Open Portal Schools: The Real Impact of Computer-Based Education. The concepts in that paper were later illustrated with the puzzle diagram shown here. See Piece 9, Open Portal System? That’s the embryonic KEPLAIR.
I’ll write more about how KEPLAIR has evolved in the coming weeks. Bye for now,
Liza
