My history intersects with that of Plato, but this intersection is short. Plato was, indeed, a computer0aided instruction (CAI) system, even as late as the 1990s when I looked at it. That made it innovative (though by 1990, not that innovative). But what it wasn't, in any way sense or form was open. A school like ours would invest either in Plato or in the internet; there wasn't a middle ground. Which means, I think, we need to ask where Plato fits in the history of instructional technology. Any number of people were creating mainframe 'teaching machines'. To my mind, the really important instructional technology advances were communications technologies such as Usenet and email, and sharing technologies such as FTP, Gopher, and the web. I tried to convince the Plato representatives to release an internet version of the software. But there was no future in that, I was told.
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