No More Pencils, No More Books -- Write and Read Electronically
"In 1957, Douglas Engelbart set out to give humanity something better than paper and pencil for working out solutions to its problems. Not a specific problem, mind you, but all problems. This idea gnawed within him for seven years and led him to the Stanford Research Institute [where he] established what is now called the Augmentation Research Center."
Part of a special issue titled: Here Comes the Tuned-In, Wired-Up, Plugged-In, Hyperarticulate Speed-of-Light Society - An Electronics Special Report
(SRI-ARC Catalog Item XDOC 9705)
Extended Mind interview with Donald Clark
“In this episode of Great Minds on Learning, John Helmer interviews Donald Clark exploring The Extended Mind. Where do our thoughts live? And if, as some theorists contend, they do not observe physical limitations, but extends to our technology tools and physical surroundings, what are the implications for learning?” Includes Great Mind Doug Engelbart's vision on collective intelligence.
See also: Episode Notes | Detail: Learning Theorists | Detail: Engelbart on Collective IQ
A Machine for Thinking: How Douglas Engelbart Predicted the Future of Computing
“More than 50 years ago, Douglas Engelbart gave the "Mother of All Demos" that transformed software forever. The computer world has been catching up with his vision ever since.” See Also: About the Hidden Heroes Series
Improvement communities
“Improving the way we improve is a collective effort with exponential rewards. But why have so few industries embraced it?”
See companion article Collective IQ and Continuous Improvement
Collective IQ and Continuous Improvement
“How do you harness the collective intelligence of a group, solve difficult problems, and share what you learn?”
An excellent distillation and synthesis of Doug Engelbart's driving vision for navigating accelerating change. See companion article Improvement communities
How to Think Outside Your Brain
“Our culture insists that the brain is the sole locus of thinking. Ms. Paul challenges us to rethink what we think about thinking. Our bodies, our social networks and our surroundings, she argues, are “extra-neural” inputs that have a profound influence on cognition."
This article is a prelude to her new book The Extended Mind. Her work aligns brilliantly with Doug Engelbart's concepts of augmented intellect and collective IQ.
Related Articles Appearing In: Washington Post | Author's Website
Augmenting the Learning Dialogue Online
A Q&A with Gardner Campbell “We've heard a lot lately about moving the remote learning experience farther away from a training model and closer to a collaborative learning model in which students participate together in the co-creation or discovery of knowledge.
As far back as the 1960s, alongside the work of Doug Engelbart, people have dreamed about ways to augment the knowledge worker, the researcher, the scholar, the faculty, and the student... Today, a conversation about how to do that ”
75 Years of Innovation: The Computer Mouse
“A major development in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) driving the advent of more accessible and controllable consumer computers. [...] Engelbart was a visionary. He saw a world where human evolution tracked technological advances and vice versa — the two intrinsically linked and working in synchronicity.”
From the series 75 years of innovation at SRI International
"What Would Doug Engelbart Do?" Ask Organizers of a Silicon Valley Event
“Inspired by the man who showed the way to modern computing, tech-minded experts shared ideas for how to tackle climate change, nuclear proliferation, and broken political systems.”
How design factored into "the mother of all tech demos"
“A crucial, but rarely discussed element of Engelbart’s stagecraft was his custom-built chair. Herman Miller designer Jack Kelley modified an Eames shell chair and affixed a detatchable tray to house a keyboard, a computer mouse, and a keyset.” Jack Kelly recalls the setup for the seminal demo - “I designed the computer chair with a swing-out console because Engelbart liked to work in different attitudes and statures … stand-up, sit down, relax. … How do you solve for that?”
Net@50: Did Engelbart's “Mother of All Demos” Launch the Connected World?
“His goal was building systems to augment human intelligence. His group prototyped much of modern computing (and invented the mouse) along the way”
50 Years Later, We Still Don’t Grasp the Mother of All Demos
“To Engelbart, his work was never about the technology itself, but about helping people work together to solve the world’s biggest problems.”
How Doug Engelbart Pulled off the Mother of All Demos
“Engelbart’s idea was that computers of the future should be optimized for human needs. [...] They should augment rather than replace the human intellect.”
50 years ago, Douglas Engelbart’s ‘Mother of All Demos’ changed personal technology forever
“Imagine someone demonstrating a jet plane 15 years before Kitty Hawk [or] a smartphone 15 years before the first cellular networks were even launched.”
In One 1968 Presentation, This Inventor Shaped Modern Computing
“Douglas Engelbart’s career was about seeing the possibilities of what computing could do for humanity.”
Here's How To Master The ABCs Of Innovation
“Fortune 500 CEOs cited dealing with the rapid pace of technological change as their "single biggest challenge." Another global survey [...] identified the speed of disruptive innovation as one of the highest risks facing their organizations. [...] Yet, the intense attention on innovation often misses a key element. [While] many companies are paying attention to immediate challenges and opportunities, [...] too few are being innovative in how they innovate. [...] Douglas Engelbart, the noted engineer and inventor, captured the critical difference when he wrote "the key to the long-term viability of an organization is to get better "and better at improving itself." To understand why, take a look at Englebart's framework for the "ABCs of Organizational Improvement."
See this article tweeted by the Author, and trending on Twitter.”
Elephant Footprint: The Vision and Impact of Douglas Engelbart
Choose Format: eReader | Blog
DOUG ENGELBART'S VISION AND IMPACT TRANSCENDED HIS COMPUTER MOUSE - “At the time of his passing, Engelbart was frustrated by humans’ failure to prioritize the power of the Creative IQ. His vision was that technology would work with our infinite capacities as humans, not work independently of them.” [ See also: Editor's Note | Inventors Digest - June 2016 Issue ]
Internet Pioneer's Greatest Contribution May Not Be Technological
“Doug Engelbart's greatest breakthrough may be to change how we think, how we learn and innovate, and how we collaborate." The Internet Hall of Fame featured profile on this 2014 Inductee, including how one university is putting his vision to practice in an experimental MOOC and associated Engelbart Scholar Award program.
Douglas Engelbart’s Unfinished Revolution
“Engelbart’s ideas revolutionized computing and helped shape the modern world. [...] To Engelbart, computers, interfaces, and networks were means to a more important end—amplifying human intelligence to help us survive in the world we’ve created.”
Doug Engelbart's Design for High Performance Innovative Organizations
Change Your Organization's Nervous System - “I have been a fan and follower of Doug Engelbart since I first discovered his work in the early 1970s. After his death in 2013, I revisited a videotaped interview I did with Doug in November of 1991 [in which Doug described] much of his seminal thinking about how to design high performance organizations. [...] In this article, I summarize a few of the high points from that interview.”
Remembering Doug Engelbart, with two talks about his visionary work
“Engelbart was one of those people who imagined the possibility of the Internet as a place where people could work together and push humanity forward. He was ahead of his time not only in what he invented, but in how he thought about the process of creation. Digital collaboration, crowdsourcing, group innovation — these are concepts Engelbart championed 60 years ago that are still relevant (yet, importantly, not a matter of course) today.”
References: The Demo | Ian Ritchie TED Talk | Peter Hirshberg TED Talk | Augmenting Human Intellect
A few words on Doug Engelbart
“People often compare Engelbart's work to today's tech, but that misses the point. Ignore today; just think about it in terms of his goals.”
Improve Your Ecosystem's Ability to Tackle Complex Issues
“For internetworked organizations [...] there’s also a robust body of proven practices that reminds us how to accelerate our capacity for innovation as a group of people. Many of the basic principles for “bootstrapping innovation” among people who are working together online (and offline) to address complex issues were invented and practiced by Doug Engelbart. [...] At our recent Visionaries’ meeting, Christina Engelbart, Doug’s daughter, reminded us that her father’s life work revolved around helping groups of people tackle really complex issues.”
Education, Information Technologies, and the Augmentation of Human Intellect
“Capturing a moment in which participatory culture offered a glimpse of ways in which creation, communication, reflection, and awareness might be part of the same complex web of activity, a kind of mindfulness that would gain purpose and direction from opportunities for creation and sharing. That mindfulness would not happen automatically. [...] But participatory culture within environments rich with integrated domains and structures encouraging reflection and mindfulness can set up all sorts of lovely feedback loops, reciprocalities, and serendipitous encounters.”
Computer visionary seeks to boost people's collective ability to confront complex problems coming at a faster pace
Douglas Engelbart has been “pursuing his vision of far more powerful systems that would help people collaborate more effectively to solve the big problems" -- many of which were complicated and speeded up by the technologies he helped launch. "That's the big, big thing that's so important: How do we increase the capability of people to deal collectively with urgent complex problems? That's been my pursuit all these years," he says.
Doug Engelbart: The Unfinished Revolution
Engelbart "pioneered what is now known as collaborative hypermedia, knowledge management, community networking and organizational transformation. After 20 years of directing his own lab at SRI, and 11 years as senior scientist, first at Tymshare, and then at McDonnell Douglas Corp., Engelbart founded the Bootstrap Institute, where he is working closely with industry and government stakeholders to launch a collaborative implementation of his work.”
Appearing in Government Technology Magazine: Special Issue "Visions: technology and government for the new millennium
Tools that make business better and better: A Silicon Valley legend
“A Silicon Valley legend who pioneered the mouse and the Internet has been thinking about how groups can work smarter--companies, divisions, teams, whatever--longer than anyone else. Better than anyone too: His ideas--long incubated, long promulgated, and long ignored--provide a way of looking at how to improve corporate performance that's fresh and refreshingly practical. His name is Douglas C. Engelbart.
Computer Pioneer Works to Raise the 'Collective IQ' of Organizations
“If not for Douglas Engelbart, a great many of the technical innovations we consider integral to the personal computer revolution would not exist. [...] His motivating concept, still largely untested today, was that information technologies could serve as the connective tissue between people and information. The result, he said, would be an exponential increase in what he calls an organization's "collective I.Q,”
See also Denise Caruso interviews Doug Engelbart: Meeting the Creator on MSNBC's The Site
Improving your organization's IQ
“In some of the most innovative companies in Silicon Valley, the name Douglas Engelbart is spoken with reverence... credited with inventing the mouse, hypertext, multiple-window screen displays, and computer conferencing, among other staples of computer technology. But his greatest innovation has been largely ignored. It is a vision of people using technology to 'improve the collective IQ of organizations'”
In this premier edition of her magazine, Hesselbein covers Engelbart's strategy for improving how we improve our organizations, and the ABCs of leveraging our Collective IQ throughout the organization's "improvement infrastructure" and across improvement communities.
The man who sees the future
Doug Engelbart's ideas "are based on the premise that the complexity and urgency of the world's problems are increasing at a rate that is greater than mankind's ability to cope. Engelbart's solution is bound up in his idea of augmenting the collective IQ of organizations through a process known as bootstrapping. Though these ideas have driven him for the better part of 45 years, to the outside world they remain largely ungrokked.”
Bootstrapping to the future
““Douglas Engelbart has been called the patron saint of the computer industry, .... One doesn't have to look very far to see the fruits of his lifelong efforts…. But these innovations were all part of a broader vision … which he calls "bootstrapping," refers to [speeding] up cycles of innovation and raise the "collective I.Q." of organizations.”
Also Avail: On Internet Archive | Scanned Clipping (for subscribers only)
Doug Engelbart’s Design for Knowledge-Based Organizations
“Doug Engelbart was driven to help people address really complex issues. One path is to support collaboration through the use of a Dynamic Knowledge Repository. [...] To Doug, bootstrapping is “getting better at getting better.” It’s at the heart of continuous innovation. He believes in the principle of leverage. Put your attention not on the thing you’re trying to design or do, but on how to IMPROVE the process you’re using to design or do, AND on also focus on how to improve your capacity to improve.”
This is a two-part article: Part 1 | Part 2.
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