Getting into Position to Think
A Reflection on My Progress as a Doctoral Student
Gregory Levitt, major professor
In partial fulfillment of requirements for the General Exam
in the Curriculum and Instruction Ph.D. program
at the University of New Orleans
part of a General Exam Portfolio
July, 1999
Getting into Position to Think
a Reflection
This paper is organized into four sections. The purpose of each is to relate my
content area, computer science, to my new role as an educator. In Why I’m here, my
intent is to show my sentiments. Why, at this time in my live, it is important for
me to become a doctor of philosophy. How I think about learningtells my story of
life-long learning and indicates my learning philosophy. What is changingrelates
recent advances in computer science to educational systems. In the final section,
Customized Learning, I discuss a teaching philosophy and its relationship to the
changing role of computers in education. The idea is to get computers out of
education. Teaching technology only makes sense to those of us born before the
development of that technology. Today, every school age American (5 to 22) was
born after the introduction of personal computers. Its time to move beyond using
computer to augment existing C&I practice and to consider how to migrate theory
and practice to accommodate an information revolution and the needs of life-long
I didn’t know Douglas Engelbart until after I returned to school in 1993, the
twenty-fifth year of my career as a computer scientist. As with most visionaries, it
has taken me and the world a long time to catch up with Douglas Engelbart.
Although his work took place in relative isolation, he is well known in scientific
and academic communities. His ideas have profoundly touched us all. During the
1950s the digital electronic computer was being conceived as a sophisticated
calculating machine. He saw it as a tool for expanding the mind's creative abilities.
During the same period when the computer's most celebrated function was to
calculate artillery trajectories for the military, he was talking about human-
computer interactivity, collaborative informational systems, and other innovations
that would become the norm much later, in the 90s.
Try to imagine "personal" computing without the mouse, the pointer cursor,
word processing, outline processing (presentations), multiple remote online users of
a networked processor (the Internet), linking and in-file object addressing (multi-
media), multiple windows, and hypermedia (the Web). These features, which we
take for granted in 1999, were unheard of before Douglas Engelbart's inquiries into
Augmented Human Intellectled to a revolutionary vision of the computer. This
vision was revealed to the computer world on December 9, 1968 ... when he and his
research team presented to the world their creation, NLS (oN Line System) at the
Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco's Civic Center.
All of these attributes of computers we take for granted today were
envisioned and implemented by Douglas Engelbart before Windows, before
Macintosh, before personal computers, and before the Internet. In 1989 (the year that
Tim Berners-Lee gave birth to the World Wide Web), Engelbart formed the
Bootstrap Institute. When explaining the focus of his organization, Engelbart (1999)
talks about boosting collective IQ, and an open hyperdocument system:
