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Table of Contents
DEC, not Digital -- -- the right thing to do: An experiment in human engineering
Where the people are -- now it's Boston/New Hampshire
Why didn't the walls come tumbling down? An outsider's view of distance education
New electronic texts -- from Gutenberg
Copyright ©1999 Richard Seltzer
This is the first draft of the introduction of a book about Digital Equipment. Permission is granted to make and distribute complete verbatim electronic copies of this item for non-commercial purposes provided the copyright information and this permission notice are preserved on all copies. All other rights reserved. To correspond with the author, send email to seltzer@samizdat.com Comments welcome.
Digital was the official branded name of Digital Equipment Corporation. That's the name that with unique lettering and color became the corporate logo and appeared in ads and on signs, stationery, and business cards.
DEC is what employees and customers called the company, in spite of edicts and branding campaigns.
Digital made computers and became the second largest computer company in the world.
DEC made loyal, fiercely competitive and entrepreneurial employees. People at all levels built their own jobs by what they did and how they did it. "He who proposes does," was the corporate truism. "Do the right thing," was the number one company rule. You didn't wait for a corporate plan to trickle down, you did what you beleived needed to be done. "It's easier to ask forgiveness than permission." Corporate meetings encouraged risktaking and individual initiative, rather than obedience. Managers were held accountable for their mistakes, but were moved, not fired, and were given the opportunity to come up with new initiatives which they could then lead.
For four decades, Digital had its ups and downs (mostly ups, until the end), as the computer industry rollercoastered along. Other computer companies pleased Wall St. by laying off workers in lean times, then hiring when business picked up.
DEC valued its employees not just for the work they did but for their ideas and initiative. A down time was an opportunity to catch your breath and reorganize, to try new ideas, to genereate new businesss that would be ready for the next inevitable upturn.
At its peak Digital was a multi-billion-dollar, multi-national company, a head-to-head competitor with IBM, acknowledged by many to have the best technology in the industry. It was a common joke that its best products were "well-kept secrets," that it used "stealth marketing," that they were often beaten by inferior products which were better marketed.
At its peak DEC was 130,000 employees who directly and indirectly served tens of thousands of fiercely loyal customers. Remember, rule number one was "do the right thing," not "say the right thing." Marketing was no where near as important as products and service and filling customer needs. The message didn't get out to everybody about what they did and how well they did it, but their core customers knew. The company and its customers stuck together through up times and down. And the innovative demands of leading-edge customer-partners kept DEC's people challenged and often led to creative product and service breakthroughs. Often it seemed that DEC was in business not for the money, but for the challenge and the feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction that could come from doing what was very difficult to do and doing it well, and doing it the way you knew it should be done.
Sometimes Digital, the corporate entity, the publicly traded company seemed at odds with DEC, this chaotic assemblage of creative individualists. But both Digital and DEC had the same leader -- Ken Olsen. And he and his company thrived not despite, but because of the unique management style that allowed such diversity and apparent chaos.
At the top, Ken defined his role as that of a gatekeeper -- the ideas came up from below, fought for by the people who had conceived them and who tested them with pilots which might be funded without corporate approval. These people owned their projects and were willing to stake their careers on them. And the teams that worked on them were also devoted -- feeling they owned pieces of the project, and sometimes working ridiculously long hours, not because someone told them to, but because it was the "right thing to do." After internal competition had taken its course and made it clearer which were the fittest to survive, Ken picked the winners -- the projects that would get the corporate resources necessary to make a major difference in the marketplace.
Computer technology ages quickly. The innovations in computer engineering that were the basis of Digital's corporate prominence in the 1980s are now mainly of historical interest -- as forerunners of what we use today.
But the human engineering of DEC -- this unique corporate culture, fostering self-motivated creativity, pride, loyalty, and competitive spirit -- is of enduring interest and value.
DEC with its internal entrepreneurship and competition, with its heavy reliance on a massive internal computer network for communication and teaming, was in many ways similar to the Internet today. Managing in that environment was similar to managing a virtual company today -- or a company dependent on many complex and tangled partnerships. As a manager, you were given responsibility without authority. You needed to make things happen but, to succeed, you had to enlist the help and support of other people and groups over which you had no managerial control -- you had to convince them that what you needed done was the right thing to do. What to outsiders might have sounded like a hollow phrase was an important tool for resolving disputes between individuals and groups, and for enlisting the help you needed to pull together teams and to succeed in your work.
Compaq bought Digital. DEC was never for sale.
The Silicon Valley has been the de facto geographic capital of the Internet -- the number one place for locating high-tech startups and for high-tech divisions of large corporations. Now it looks like the focus is shifting to the Boston suburbs and nearby Southern New Hampshire. With the growing number of cable, DSL, and Internet providers, the internet community is growing in large numbers
Why should geography matter if people can build virtual communities and virtual companies online? Our social contacts -- both physical and virtual -- form a single personal network of friendships, business associations, common experiences and mutual trust.
Face-to-face experiences form a basis for strong online relationships, and visa-versa. Traditional trade shows and conferences and seminars devoted to Internet and ecommerce topics thrive and expand, and virtual events expand the reach and extend the availability of physical-world events, rather than replace them. Existing online relationships become solidified at face-to-face events, or people meet first at such events and then maintain and extend their relationships online.
Last month, I spoke at a face-to-face distance education conference in New Brunswick, Canada (NAWeb '99), with attendees from all over the world. These people deliver courses and issue degrees to students they have never met, except online. But when they want to get really serious about subjects critical to their careers and to the advancement of the concepts and techniques which they have pioneered and championed, they gather face-to-face, year after year, building ever stronger trusting relationships with one another, which are maintained and extended online in the interim.
The dissolution of first Digital and now Compaq is setting the pre-conditions for the Boston suburbs and Southern New Hampshire to become the new high tech mecca:
1) large numbers of experienced people, who previously shared a common culture and trust, who have not only computer and Internet expertise, but also shared values and experiences.
2) empty buildings, which means low-cost commercial space.
In the late 1950s, the bizarre, vast, and sprawling set of buildings known as the Maynard Mill, became the home of high tech startups, and Digital, the most successful of them, grew to fill that space and expand explosively, becoming the world's second largest computer company. Today that space and other old Digital buildings throughout New England are filling once again with high-tech start ups.
At the same time, alums of Digital, now scattered among hundreds of high tech companies around the area, have bonds of personal friendship with those they worked with at Digital, and even a common bond of experience and trust with others who happened to have worked for that same company, with its people-oriented loyalty-building corporate culture. This bond tends to be even stronger than that among alums of the same college, because in some cases the shared experiences stretched out for 10, 20, or even 30 years: a unique level of social connectedness shared by probably a quarter million people who once worked for Digital.
A newsletter and Web site (www.decalumni.com) help maintain old ties. And personal connections, helped by email and personal Web sites, but strengthened too by continuing face-to-face social contacts creates an environment similar in many ways to the Silicon Valley of legend. And the volatility of startups -- particularly Internet startups -- means that these people keep square dancing from one company to another, turning to one another for help repeatedly in their job searches, and sharing insights as they face similar challenges at different companies.
Based on a keynote speech delivered at NAWeb '99 in Fredricton, New Brunswick, Oct. 1999, the following article is scheduled for inclusion in the book Perspectives of Web Course Management, to be pubished by Canadian Scholars Press. For slides used in the speech, see www.samizdat.com/naweb/title.htm Permission is granted to make and distribute complete verbatim electronic copies of this article for non-commercial purposes, provided this permission notice and the related contact information are preserved on all copies. All other rights reserved. To correspond with the author, send email to seltzer@samizdat.com Comments welcome.
Back in October 1993, when the first Web browsers became generally available, it looked like the Internet would change everything. And visions of paradise danced in our heads. In the arena of education, we expected:
Lectures and class discussions -- important spontaneous aspects of education -- would be captured, saved, and searchable: that key question, that key insight that comes unexpectedly as teachers and students interact. You would no longer have to count on the note-taking skills of students to capture and preserve the insights of a Socrates or a Richard Feynman. The volume of educational content would expand enormously.
Publication (and hence reputation and tenure) would no longer in the hands of a few commercial publishers (who get their content for free from professors seeking reputation and tenure, who sell subscriptions at enormous prices to college libraries, and who take forever to produce their print publications, slowing the pace of research).
Professors become like consultants, available for assignments -- at competitive prices -- from several different institutions at the same time.
Now, six year later, what actually happened?
Yes, there has been progress:
While some resources are available for free to anyone, many institutions limit access to their faculty and paying students.
Yes, many courses are available online, but for the most part, institutions continue to offer courses that are meant to mimic old-style education -- with credit hours and degrees. And they still typically serve up learning in large-size, semester or quarter-long chunks. And students in one class still typically have little interaction with students in others, much less with students from other institutions.
Lots of interaction takes place online, instead of in physical classrooms and hence could be readily captured, preserved, made searchable. But, for the most part, the content is not valued -- it as treated as transient and disposable. Chat transcripts are not preserved. There is no audio or video archive.
A number of official refereed journals have migrated to or been started on the Web. The Internet is used for pre-publication comment and spreading the word about research before print publication. But change has come slowly. And the traditional publications -- whether distributed in print or electronically -- still command a high level of respect and are still tied into the tenure process.
Work done for distance learning is considered "teaching" not "publication". Hence the more time you devote to developing and delivering online courses and perfecting the art of doing that well, the less time you have for activities that would help you get tenure.
While they don't value this material for purposes of tenure, many schools claim ownership ("work for hire") of the class materials that their teachers create for online learning. Not only can you not make that material available to the general public, but when leave the school, you can't deliver that course anymore.
Contracts of many schools prevent your teaching online courses for any other institution.
What happened (or what didn't happen)?
As usual, we see an enormous gap between what's technologically possible and what actually happens, a gap between what you see in labs and in the news and in trade shows, and what becomes widely adopted and changes how we learn and work and live. It's the age-old gap between the possible and the real.
Only what people use will change how we learn and work and live.
Technology stimulates the imagination.
Marketing changes the world.
What are the barriers to change in distance education?
There are static barriers -- the human barriers of habit, regulations, and industry practice (including "standard" contracts). There are also dynamic barriers -- cost barriers: where technology drives down costs which opens business opportunities, and business drives volume, which drives costs far lower, which opens new opportunities.
The human barriers to change in distance education are normal, natural, essential elements of everyday reality. You may love to teach, but you don't teach just for the love of it. You need pay and security and predictability. You need to be able to build a stable career and put food on the table for yourself and your family.
Education is a business, not a charity. It depends on tuition fees and salaries and contracts. And the value that people are willing to pay for depends on accreditation, course credits, degree programs. And career advancement and security depend on systems of rewards and recognition, with promotions and tenure.
There's a lot of inertia there, a lot of resistance to change, and that's not a bad thing. Just don't expect miracles, don't expect radical change from schools that in many ways still closely resemble the Renaissance institutions they are descended from.
But while the human barriers are static, the cost barriers are dynamic. And thanks to the combination of technology and business, change is coming to education -- just not as fast as folks like me might have dreamed of.
As an example, let's look at audio/video storage cost.
Six years ago storage cost was prohibitively high for large-scale archiving of audio and video. My dream of saving lectures and even class discussions didn't make economic sense. And, of course, back then, you couldn't easily search audio and video files, as you can today.
But, thanks to advances in technology, the cost has been declining rapidly. Now it's starting to get very interesting. That new PC you are tempted by probably has more than 10 gigabytes of storage. And business factors are likely to accelerate the rate of change. For instance, digital storage is getting so cheap that over the next few years it's likely to replace videotape for saving and retrieving television programs in the home. We already see ads for units like that which sell for about $500. If such an application takes off, the increased volumes could drive down the price of consumer-quality disk drives in general (like the use of transistors in portable radios drove down the price of transistors back in the 1950s.) Very soon, what sounded utopian, will begin to be practical.
So what's the next-generation audio/video opportunity?
We'll see increasing bandwidth on campus with gigabit Ethernet.
Bandwidth for remote students will also increase, with DSL and cable replacing dial-up.
Searchable digital audio and video, based on voice recognition, (as Virage does today) will become common place.
It will be common place for chat applications to automatically save transcripts, and organize them in threads of discussion, and embed them in forums for further discussion (as SiteScape does today).
Hence, we'll see opportunities to integrate audio/video content with text -- make it all searchable, make it easy for us to comment on it.
Meanwhile, not-so-formal education is flourishing on the Web -- continuing education -- where the goal is to learn something useful, rather than earning a degree tenure and publications and Web and academic journals -- and also tutor/mentor/expert learning styles.
Recently, several companies launched "expert" sites on the Web. Part of their rationale is that people can't find answers with search engines. This is due in large part to the fact that people new to the Internet don't know how to use search engines, and don't know about the other free resources available on the Internet and how to get the most out of them. And they come to the Internet with the expectation that you have to pay to get quality information.
They are setting up databases that match people with questions and people who have the knowledge and experience to answer them.
This is an interesting alternative model for learning and for earning.
If your contract prohibits you from teaching distance education courses for other educational institutions, does it prohibit you from private tutoring? Probably not. Does it prohibit you from consulting? Probably not. Does it even foresee the possibility of your getting paid for providing answers, information, and instruction online in small chunks, to random customers? Probably not.
Check out some of these startups:
Today, well-established Web-based services strive to help you find the place where you can find the people with answers, who are willing to share in the old pre-Web Internet style. Deja.com does this for newsgroups, Liszt.com for distribution lists, and Forumone for forums.
These startups strive to be the place with the experts and answers, not just to point you somewhere else. These startups are geared Internet newcomers, for users who:
Believe it or not, in many cases, these people would rather pay. They'll value the answers more if they have to pay for them.
So where does this take us?
I see a new utopia in the works -- a more practical, doable vision of where distance education is headed.
First, I see an emphasis of matching people-to-people for learning and earning, in the style of these startups. Databases will help match people with people, as the basis for paid online tutor and mentor services, without institutional boundaries.
So try out those new sites and maybe make a few dollars today, while you figure out how to adapt that model to be effective for education. And spread the word -- make sure your department head signs up as an expert, too. That's your best insurance against the creation of new restrictive policies and contract terms -- get the decision-makers involved on a personal basis, get self-interest working on your side.
At the same time, I hope and expect to see more reciprocal agreements to expand academic sharing.
We have plenty of examples of grassroots sharing over the Internet:
Is that truly necessary? Or is it a matter of inertia?
Consider interlibrary loan programs as an example of how institutions can share their intellectual property for the benefit of all. Why not negotiate similar reciprocal agreements for sharing distance learning resources and even people? This could include course materials, controlled access to particular teachers as online guest lecturers, plus audio/video of lectures and class discussions.
Let's imagine not costs drop to the point where it becomes relatively inexpensive to save lectures and course discussions in audio and maybe video form and to make those digital files searchable. Then give millions of students around the world the right to do such searches and to access the files that match. Demand from a single institution would probably not be enough to justify the effort -- who aside from the students in the class would be interested? Yes, it would help those who couldn't attend that particular lecture. Yes it would make it easier to review for exams, even when you don't have notes of the lectures. But that's still very few people per gigabyte or even terabyte of storage. But when those files might be accessed by students from other institutions, that changes the equation.
Save, index, and share spontaneous educational content: transient Web content -- like chat; transient classroom content -- like the lecture that is delivered spontaneously from rough notes, and the unexpected classroom exchange.
We also can expect to see more alternatives to traditional publishing:
not just putting text on the Web instead of or in addition to paper, but
treating the Web as a different medium. Remember that copyright covers the particular expression of your ideas, not the ideas themselves. So in learning to adapt your ideas to a new medium you are opening new opportunities for selling your writing. Your college may have locked up the copyright on your online teaching materials "work for hire." But you might be able to be paid for different expressions of those same thoughts. As an example of this direction, take a look at Learnlots.com. They are repackaging tutorial content for the Web, in easily digestible pieces, which they call "learnlets" -- little chunks of instruction that take no more than a few minutes to read and absorb; interrelated in series.
Meanwhile, we need to institutionalize and reward Web-based academic functions. Much of the work that is necessary for the success of a distance education program is not valued at all by the administration today. It's work that you are supposed to just fit in somehow. What you do to make your course easily accessible over the Web, the time you put in for online interaction with students, the research to track down and make accessible useful online resources, that's just taken for granted. Print publication counts toward tenure. Online activities count for zilch.
The people who perform important functions should be given important titles, and be paid commensurate with the value of what they do, and have their workloads adjusted so they can give these activities the right kind of attention.
Consider the model of About.com (formerly The Mining Company). Their guides organize resources relating to a particular subject, answer questions, and in the process build personal reputation. Imagine formalizing such a role within a department. The online guide for molecular biophysics at your school might help your school develop an international reputation in that field by serving as a guide not just for your school, but also for students and faculty elsewhere.
Consider also the example of iSyndicate.com, which distributes Web content (for a price) across a variety of commercial Web sites. The writer gets paid. And the Web sites get content that their visitors are interested in.
Why not syndicate course modules in a similar way? Not entire courses -- that would be more a distance education clearinghouse kind of operation, like Western Governance. Rather, syndicate one lecture or a few interrelated lectures, or even discrete elements of a single lecture or class experience.
Imagine that you as a teacher or administrator are trying to put together all the pieces you need for a distance education class. You could search here to find pieces that you need to complete or enhance a course you plan to offer. Or if you are a creative distance education teacher, you could have your materials and your time (as guest lecturer) offered in this mode.
In this case, you would probably be prevented by contract from listing your own material and your own services as an individual and getting paid as an individual. But your institution might want to list you -- and get paid for your work and your services, or qualify for reciprocal benefits from the other institution.
Then suddenly distance education ceases to be just a another form of teaching, which, strangely, most colleges have never valued. Rather it becomes a way to enhance the reputation of the institution and the department and to generate new revenue or other benefits for them.
You might think of this scheme as "educational outsourcing." You can mix and match to build/enhance an online course: focus on what you do best and "outsource" the rest. And at the same time, your college offers your services in this mode, with prices determined by demand, which depends on reputation. Then the quality of your teaching becomes a source of additional revenue for your institution, and your cross-institutional work builds your reputation and that of your institution/department.
Hence, over time, distance education gradually becomes a key factor in tenure decisions.
In summary, very interesting opportunities are opening up, opportunities that could greatly change how people teach and learn, and how they get paid for their teaching. It will take a lot of creativity and effort on the part of many people to make this practical utopia a reality -- but it can be done. Spread the word and help change the world.
Adding dozens of new titles every month, Gutenberg has already made over 2000 etexts available for free over the Internet. These include classic works of literature and history, as well as out-of-print and little-known works by great authors. If you can, connect by ftp, rather than the Web, to get the most recent ones. Here's a list of those recently added, alphabetized by author. The file name is useful for fetching the text from the ftp site. Many of these are also available on diskette from PLEASE COPY THIS DISK for those who cannot get them themselves. For the current catalog, check http://www.samizdat.com/catalog.html or send your email request to seltzer@samizdat.com)
Twenty-Two Goblins (Translated from the Sanskrit) (22gbl10.txt)
James Lane Allen -- The Choir Invisible (chrnv10.txt)
Ludwig Anzengruber -- Der Gwissenswurm (7gwss10.txt = without accents, 8gwss10.txt = with accents)
Victor Appleton -- Tom Swift And His Motor-Boat (02tom10.txt)
Ludwig Achim von Arnim -- Isabella von Aegypten (7isbl10.txt = without accents, 8isbl10.txt = with accents)
Honore de Balzac -- Droll Stories, volume 2 (2drll10.txt)
Giambattista Basile -- Stories from Pentamerone (pntmn10.txt)
Max Beerbohm -- Yet Again (ytagn10.txt)
Arnold Bennett -- How to Live on 24 Hours a Day (24hrs10.txt)
Isabella L. Bird -- Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (utrkj10.txt)
William S. Braithwaite -- Anthology of Massachusetts Poets (mpoet10.txt)
Thomas Carlyle -- History of Friedrich II of Prussia Volume 12 (12frd10.txt)
Joseph Conrad -- A Set of Six (seto610.txt)
James Fenimore Cooper --
Richard Harding Davis -- The Lost Road, etc (lstrd10.txt)
Fyodor Dostoyevsky --
Joel Chandler Harris -- Uncle Remus/Songs/Sayings (remus10.txt)
Bret Harte --
O Henry -- Waifs and Strays, etc, Part 1 (1waif10.txt)
James Hogg -- Confessions of A Justified Sinner (pmfjs10.txt)
Homer, translated by Samuel Butler -- The Iliad (iliad10.txt)
Anthony Hope --
Henry James -- Pandora (pndra10.txt)
Richard Jefferies -- The Story of My Heart (tsomh10.txt)
Jerome K. Jerome --
Joseph C. Lincoln -- The Depot Master (dpmst10.txt)
Pierre Loti -- An Iceland Fisherman (icfsh10.txt)
George MacDonald -- David Elginbrod (lgnbd10.txt)
E. Philips Oppenheim -- Havoc (havoc10.txt)
Adelaide Ann Proctor -- Legends and Lyrics part 1 (lgly110.txt), part 2 (lgly210.txt)
Walter Raleigh -- The Discovery of Guiana (guian10.txt)
William MacLeod Raine -- Ridgway of Montana (rdgwy10.txt)
G. Harvey Ralphson -- Boy Scouts in Mexico (bsim10.txt)
Charles Reade -- A Simpleton (smptn10.txt)
Rilke -- Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurid Brigge (7malt10.txt = without accents, 8malt10.txt = with accents)
Edward P. Roe -- He Fell In Love With His Wife (inlhw10.txt)
Gerold K. Rohner -- Frau und Kindern auf der Spur (7spur10.txt = without accents, 8spur10.txt = with accents)
George Sand -- Mauprat (muprt10.txt)
Ernest Thompson Seton -- Animal Heroes (anhro10.txt)
Tobias Smollett -- Travels through France & Italy (ttfai10.txt)
Mark Twain -- Captain Stormfield (cptst10.txt)
Christoph Martin Wieland --
P.G. Wodehouse -- A Damsel in Distress (dmsnd10.txt)
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