Student Showcase
Overview1
The Doug Engelbart Institute is proud to showcase these creative and insightful works by students, and to recognize their instructors who provided inspiration in an enabling venue. Our inspiration for this portal page came from friend and colleague Professor Gardner Campbell who wrote in a recent tribute to Doug Engelbart: 1a
"it is good also to see and remember what school at its best can be, and is: a means of augmenting human intellect, a place for bootstrapping, a place for hearts and minds to work and play together..." read more
Our first showcased student project, Philip's Video Project (below), was produced by one of Dr. Campbell's first-year Honors students at Baylor for his course From Memex to YouTube.
See also our University Showcase for more on the professors and their courses that feature Doug Engelbart's work, as well as our Just for Kids corner for the kid in all of us.
1b
Gallery
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Middle School
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Zaidie's Video Project 3a
College Undergraduate
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Philip's Video Project 5a
Anisa & Will's Presentation 5b
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Title: |
"Engelbart Recontextualized: Reworking Frameworks for Reworking Frameworks (and more similarly meta things)"
watch video | slide deck |
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By: |
Mary Anisa Kannan
& Will Sullivan, Undergraduates, Virginia Commonwealth University, Spring 2015 |
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Major: |
Will - Art/Illustration
Anisa - Biotechnology |
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Course: |
This course has 3 titles(!) and is run as a "Digital Engagement Expedition":
Inquiry and the Craft of Argument / "Living the Dreams: Digital Investigations and Unfettered Minds" / Thought Vectors in Concept Space |
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Assignment: |
As recipients of the Engelbart Scholar Award, Will and Anisa visited the Doug Engelbart Archives in California to research their project in depth. They presented their findings in this presentation at ALTfest 2015, and contributed substantially to two videos depicting their experience (see award details for more). |
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Instructor: |
Dr. W. Gardner Campbell (blog)
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Excerpts: |
From the 3 sections of their presentation:
On Augmentation: "[Doug] wanted to make the way we interact with computers as seamless as possible, like an extension of our minds." [...] "He looked at it like evolution, as human beings we reached a stagnant point for our intellect, we could use computers to tap into our central nervous system so to speak and make ourselves more intelligent." [...] "They were batch processing with punch cards before people like Doug came along and said 'we could be interacting in knowledge space'" [...]
On Collaboration: "what can come from collaboration, just like lots of different neurons in the brain that all work together to form high level processing in our minds, he imagined the same with lots of different people, and lots of different computers, if we could all work together, something better is going to happen" [...]
On Bootstrapping: "brings it all around again - where we should augment technology, we should be collaborating, we should have these integrated systems, and that's all going to keep changing, so how do we set up a system that we could then use to re-up the system, so we can keep [increasing our efficiency]" [...] "he delineated the three levels of business into the ABCs of Bootstrapping: 'A' is normal business like coming to class and teaching; 'B' is the R&D of how you do what you do at the A level better; what he was really fascinated by was 'C' how you improve the way you improve; later he was all about creating C level communities where many people from many disciplines get together and work to improve how they improve." |
| Press: |
Richmond Times-Dispatch: VCU launches MOOCs |
Graduate Level6
Christine's Essay
6a
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Title: |
Douglas Engelbart: Augmenting Human Intellect and Bootstrapping |
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By: |
Christine Rosakranse, Graduate Student, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Fall 2009 |
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Program: |
Master's in Human-Computer Interaction |
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Course: |
Theory and Research in HCI |
| Assignment: |
Short Historical Perspective Essay |
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Instructor: |
Professor Nathan G. Freier (linkedin) |
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Excerpts: |
From Christine's Essay:
"As coined by Engelbart, organizations can improve the process they use for improvement, thereby iteratively compounding the effect. As a goal for HCI, iterative progress towards making information more usable, intuitive, and effective would be the perfect compliment to Engelbart’s dream." read more
See also Christine's work on:
Augmenting Human Compassion[1], which expands on the concluding statement of her showcased essay:
"It seems that intellect’s final compatriots would be responsibility and compassion, and if this has not yet been addressed, perhaps it will be in the next iteration."
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Suzan's Dissertation
6b
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Title: |
Third Learning Spaces in Open Online Courses: Findings from an Interpretive Case Study
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By: |
Suzan Koseoglu, PhD Candidate, Spring 2016 |
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Program: |
Learning Technologies, Dept. of Curriculum and Instruction, University of Minnesota |
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Advisor: |
Dr. Cassandra M. Scharber |
| Case Study Environment: |
Focus of this study was the massive online course known as Thought Vectors in Concept Space – a cMOOC 'learning expedition' version of UNIV200 offered by Prof. Gardner Campbell et.al at Virginia Commonwealth University. |
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The online environment for the course emphasized student interaction with faculty, with each other, with ideas and thought experiments, within a shared emerging knowledge base of their blogposts, tweets, and commentary. In this 'connectivist' MOOC (cMOOC) environment, participants were encouraged to 'find their voice' in open forum. Readings included the early works of visionary pioneers of the Information Age, including Doug Engelbart, Alan Kay, Ted Nelson, etc. The design and evolution of the course expemplify Engelbart's innovation strategy for raising Collective IQ. Although Suzan's dissertation is not about Doug Engelbart per se, it is a study of a course that puts his strategic vision to practice. |
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Research Questions |
What did open participation look like in a massive open online course on research inquiry? What did learning look like? |
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Excerpts: |
From Suzan's dissertation:
"In this case study, I present an interpretive exploration of five open participants' learning experiences in a massive open online course (MOOC), which was offered by a higher education institute in the United States as a general education course in research writing. [...]
Three pedagogical principles firmly emerged from this study: (1) give voice to the authentic self; (2) recognize the contextual nature of open scholarship; (3) be cognizant of multiple layers of digital literacies, such as open and networked literacies. [...]
Perhaps the fact that the world's most prestigious colleges and universities were offering their best courses [online] for free is enough to explain [growing] excitement. But I'd like to suggest that the thing that keeps thousands of people involved in a quality online class derives from a special something – an esprit de course – that makes a great course indecipherably unique.
The UNIV 200, or #thoughtvectors, was delivered in such a special spirit. The passion the course designers had was embodied in their blogs, Twitter messages, comments to students and open participants, the course hangouts; in other words, in their everyday teaching. The idea of learning in a collective space, or being together on a learning journey, was fully embraced by the instructors themselves. They believed that "wonderful things" could happen when formal learning took place on the web and with the web, because the online connections (both with resources and people) could powerfully "augment the human intellect."
read more
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Endnotes
Submitted for publication to SIGWEB 2009 https://www.slideshare.net/poetrosakranse/augmenting-human-compassion-a-conceptual-framework
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See Also
• University Showcase
• Engelbart Scholar Award
• Just for Kids!
Salient Quotes
"My solution was to [...] focus on the goals behind his work, something that's important to emphasize because our use of computers has yet to reach the potential Engelbart had in mind."
– Philip Heinrich, Honors Freshman, Baylor Univ. Spring 2009
"As a goal for HCI, iterative progress towards making information more usable, intuitive, and effective would be the perfect compliment to Engelbart’s dream."
– Christine Rosakranse, Graduate Student, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Fall 2009
"Doug thought at scale. He understood that a car is not simply a faster tricycle. He had faith that an augmented intellect, joined to millions of other augmented intellects, could clarify individual thought even as it empowered vast new modes of thinking, new modes of complex understanding that could grasp intricately meaningful symbols as quickly and comprehensively as we can recognize a loved one’s face."
– Gardner Campbell,
Philip's professor
Class Blogs
From Gardner's 2015
'Thought Vectors' MOOC
Gardner's 2010 Awakening the Digital Imagination faculty development seminar, having just studied Engelbart's 1962 manifesto Augmenting Human Intellect
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