History of CALL:The 60s

Betzayda Lara Castillo

The 60’s: “The Pioneering Wilderness” featuring PLATO.

The 60’s were characterized by…• Pedagogy Audiolingualism

• Psychology Behaviorism

• Linguistics Structuralism

Programmed

Logic for

Automatic

Teaching

Operations

Started by Don Bitzer, Professor of Electrical Engineering.

Designed to deliver learning packaged to large number of Ss’

Communication system > “note files”:

Tutor and learner.

Learner groups

Sentence Judger

Three main functions:

2. Looked for synonyms and key words in Ss’ answer.

3. Misspelling

4. Word order

Advantages of PLATO:• Displayed different alphabets on same screen.

“Plato was able to provide a highly coordinated and sophisticated site management system.” (Hart, 1995 at Levy 1997:16).

• Easy to use.

• Tutor: authoring language. Didn’t have flexibility of object-oriented programming.

• Adding text to Speech Synthesis mechanism with PLATO.

• Development of PLATO guided by practical concerns.

• Range of languages: English, Esperanto, French, German, Hindi, Latin, Modern Hebrew, Modern Greek, Norwegian, Russian and Swedish.

Hart (1995:30)• Plato laboratory featured 50,000 hours of

language instruction per semester. Plus another 50,000 hours in other curricula.

• Twelve different languages.

Levy (1997:17)

• “First project engaging language teachers and technical staff in the development of CALL materials in a coordinated way.”

The 60s: “The pioneering wilderness”, back to BASIC

• 1960 – Project TIP (Technical Information Project), first prototype of documentary server.

• 1961 – Paul Baran, “Packet switching network”, first Network model in military communication.

• 1963 – “A conceptual framework for the argumentation of Man’s intelligence” by Engelbart, the beginning of H-LAM/T (Human using Language Artifacts, and Methodolofy, in which he is Trained)(oN-Line System)

• 1965 – “Hipertext”, coined by Ted Nelson, becames “official”.

• 1964 - BASIC (Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) by Thomas Kurtz & John Kennedy

Computers:

• 1960 – DEC´s (Digital Equipment Corp.)PDP-1 sold for $120,000.

• It was included with a cathode ray tube graphic display, needed no air conditioning and required only one operator.

• 1961 – IBM introduces the 1400 Series, which replaced the vacuum tube with smaller, more reliable transistors and used a magnetic core memory.

• 1964 – Seymour Cray invents the supercomputer CDC 6600

Some other advances…

• First videodisk is invented by D. Cregg

• Project APARNET (ARPA): an extension of packet switching (ancestor of internet).

• Jean-Claude Gardin, SYNTOL (Syntagmatic Organization Language) General Model.

• The Stony Brook Experiment

Mid to late 60’s: Stony Brooks.• “Hypertext Editing System” by Ted Nelson and et

Andries van Dam at Brown University.

• Then changes to FRESS

File

Retrieval and

Editing

System

“Big Blue”, early commercial founders of CALL development”.

Mid to Late 60’s: Stony Brook

• Better performances using the computer in writing and also in reading.

• Use of teletypes, disadvantage, they were too noisy.

• People involved: – William Morris (IBM)

– Stony Brook (psychologist)

• German and French used for the experiments.

“The late 60s and erly 70s are of particular historical importance to CALL”

(Ahmad et al,1985:28)

• Collaboration project.

• Develop a programmed learning approach to language instruction.

• This project connected teletype machines to a mainframe computer system.

• Students enjoyed the use of technology

• Written and reading skills improved.

Is the Hippy era a Happy era?

“CALL's origins can be

traced back to the 1960s.”

(Davies, 2002)

The late 60s

• PILOT• UNIX (machine

independent)• The IBM 1500 appears • The Scientific Language

Project at Univeristy of Essex (read Russian articles)

• First concordancing program

• Mini computers were about to be born

Late 60’s. Is the Hippy Era a Happy era:?

• 1996: Invention of the “mouse” by Douglas Engelbart.

• PASCAL (language) is invented by Niklaus Wirth.

• First cheap micro-computer: PDP8 (Programmed Data Process) by Digital Equipment Corporation).

• LOGO (language) by Seymour Papert.

References

• URL: www.computerhistory.org/timeline

• Davies, G. (2002). CALL (computer assisted language learning). Retrieved on 29.09.08 from:

URL:http://www.llas.ac.uk/resources/goodpractice. aspx?resourceid=61

• URL:http://students.ou.edu/W/Katherine.C.Woodson-1/NEWSSITE.htm