As I was preparing to leave Texas A&M with my master’s degree, my advisor, Udo Pooch, pulled me aside and told me, “Curt, you are really good at security and distributed networks. Ignore all that and focus on the world wide web. It is going to be big.” It was the beginning of 1993 and sage advice. The whole world was about to change.
I arrived at West Point and we settled into our New Brick house on Connor Road. We were at the top of the hill and were fortunate enough to live next door to my West Point classmate Jim Drago and his lovely wife Laure. My officemate, New Brick neighbor, and likeminded disruptive professor was Rick Howard.
Being Disruptive
West Point’s First Website
MAJ Eugene Ressler and Eric Markert from the Math department built the first prototype of an Academy website. When Gene saw my work on my web-based course, he invited me to the team to take the prototype to an approved website by Academy leadership. My contributions focused on the guided tour of West Point for prospective candidates, current cadets, faculty, and at the time, 2 million visitors annually to West Point.
The change was significant for many organizations and West Point was no different. The Admissions department was illustrative. Their logic was they had six people to answer the phone and needed six people to answer the phone for admissions. How could they possibly support admissions questions and applications coming in through a website? Because of the widespread impact, the decision was to be made by the Academic Board which was the senior most shared governance body at West Point at the time. Because I was the most junior member of the development team, I was chosen to give the decision brief to the Academic Board.
As the image below captures, the Academic Board is mindful of the rich history of West Point and its traditions and guided by the values of the institution. Illustrative of the challenges of this approach, there is rotating fan from World War II to the right of this image. It does not work and has never been replaced.
“West Point has gone 200 years without a website. It will go 200 more years without a website.
Member of the Academic Board, 1994
The discussion was spirited between the Academic Board members. Ultimately, the Superintendent and Rhodes Scholar, LTG Howard Graves, and the majority of the Academic Board supported a West Point website. Admissions voted in favor of the website. It was important lesson that really intelligent and important leaders can be 100% wrong. The Superintendent got it right.
Sending a very junior member of the team to brief a strategic initiative can work in a hierarchy-based organization. Power is based on title, position and access. Using a very smart junior leader to carry the message can work. Later, I would deploy this approach utilizing Cadets Ben Ring and Christa Chewar with the Chief of Staff of the Army who was delighted to mentor cadets over the summer but never suspected they carried a message about the importance of the world wide web, digital libraries, and the advantages of multimedia in learning. It did not hurt that the Chief of Staff of the Army was GEN Gordon Sullivan – a visionary leader who would later be recognized with the Sylvanus Thayer Award.
As I intimated above, my exploration of world wide web extended to how it affected Army operations. In my first year, I took the most important Army Field Manual at the time, FM 100-5, and created a media rich hypertext version of it that was searchable, greatly expanded with multimedia material, and fit on a 3.5″ floppy disk. I didn’t publicize it but it was picked up as an important development by the Command and General Staff College (CGSC) as as well as the technology advisor for the Chief of Staff of the Army, GEN Gordon Sullivan. CGSC used it in the mid career course and thus it spread throughout the Army quickly. The technology advisor to the Chief of Staff of the Army saw the potential of approach for building a digital library for the Army and he became an important sponsor of my academic research.
Fixing West Point’s Network with Laughter
Another important lesson I learned is that there is politics in everything and sometimes it takes two naïve but earnest professors to solve a strategic political problem. Now you may note that this is the second time at West Point I was a sacrificial lamb causing problems and somehow finding myself in a room full of senior leaders who vastly outranked me and unbeknownst to me, did not trust or even like the other people in the room. It won’t be the last time.
Let me set the stage. Its 1993 and the world wide web is new and disruptive. West Point had about 8,000 employees and 4,000 cadets all using this very slow, very unreliable network to explore a nascent and exciting Internet. Part of the problem is structural: West Point like many other universities did not have enough bandwidth. Part of the problem was political: there is no chief information officer and instead IT power is split between the department of electrical engineering and computer science, the dean’s director of IT, and the standard army installation Department of Information Management who is not resourced to handle academic computing. This split power base did not meet to discuss technology strategy (ever) and tried to operate as if the other two groups did not exist. To expose the peril of this approach, you only needed four cadets and a new game that you could play across the network: Doom.
Playing the game across the network brought the entire West Point network down. The three previously mentioned organizations did not figure out the problem and instead the network came back up once the four cadets stopped playing Doom many hours later. While everyone pointed fingers at each other, my office roommate Rick Howard and I decided to take a hard look at the network to see if we could figure out what was going on. Ahh, the arrogance of youth. Shockingly, we did figure it out. West Point had built its network on a ring of routers with a cascading set of hubs below the routers. Note I used the word “hub” and not “switch“. These hubs were the least expensive solution to the connectivity problem and could not do any routing or switching. They just provided connectivity. Everything went back to the router for decision-making. While the router had a lot of ports, the network technicians crammed everything onto a single connection on the router. There was no protocol blocking but instead everything was blasted to everything. While this lowers cost a little, it greatly increases network congestion and network collisions. The cumulative effect of the three previously mentioned decisions effectively crammed 4,000 cadets on a single, 10 megabit per second wire. Using switches, all the ports, and some network routing protocol other than broadcast would have helped immensely.
Rick and I collected a good bit of data and being naïve but earnest, just called a meeting of the three organizational leaders to discuss what we found. COL Frank Monaco attending representing the DOIM and COL Bill Lane (my boss’ boss) attended representing EECS. The meeting started icy cold and filled with tension and mistrust. After each organizational leader gave a 10 minute political speech of the merits of working together with absolutely no concrete steps to do so. With half of the meeting time gone, Rick and I unknowingly warmed the meeting up to a productive temperature by getting everyone to laugh at us, lower their shields a little bit, and consider the data. One of the network tests had been done during a maintenance window. In full disclosure, the laughing part took about 3 minutes and was prolonged and very awkward as we were the most junior folks in the room. Once the politics was out of the way, the all of the technical expertise in the room could focus on solving the problem. There was a look of horror in the eyes of some of the network technicians when they realized what had occurred. Within a week, the network was properly segmented, the effective bandwidth much more than 40 times better, and the network could handle more than four cadets and a new computer game. COL Lane was already a supporter of Rick and I and we gained COL Monaco as an ally and mentor for future initiatives. Are you willing to be laughed at and discounted to make real change in your organization?
When politically outmatched, get them to laugh at you. Then they will relax and listen.
As an aside, COL Monaco had been one of my computer science instructors when I was a cadet. And….twenty years later, I was an instructor to one of his sons (Francis Monaco). It is a small, small world.
As a second aside, digital access is the new electricity. It is the new disruptor that empowers equity of access to knowledge, of authorship, and of opportunity. Not surprisingly, it thus becomes a political issue as power depends on the control of access of knowledge, of who can author and publish, and of opportunity.
Being a Junior Professor/Disruptor
All new faculty to the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department, regardless of academic or military rank, goes through an eight-week boot camp preparing, learning, and teaching the freshman core course with lots of constructive feedback from other professors. It provided a solid foundation for me to build my pedagogical approach. Later in my career, I would be responsible for running this boot camp for new instructors/professors.
This approach was complemented by a:
- culture where you were visited by your boss at least twice a semester (unannounced) for her or him to sit in your class;
- voluntary but robust Master Teacher program; and a
- promotion and tenure system based on teaching excellence, service, research, faculty development, and student development.
I have often wondered how improved the rest of academia might be if it took a similar approach for all professors. Graduating with a PhD does not make you a good educator. A peer-review eight week workshop will make you a better educator.
While most new instructors were scheduled to teach the Introduction to Computing class, I was scheduled to work for MAJ Mark Biehler in teaching the CS383 Information Systems course. Mark was a supportive boss who allowed me to explore using the world wide web as a new format for delivering course material. I partnered with course designer Florence Caffrey to design the graphical interface of the course and after a semester, the new version of the course was field-tested by cadets. Graphics, audio files, simulations, and media rich PowerPoint presentations. The cadet reaction was overwhelming positive.
Florence, Mark, and I published the initial results and it was well-received by the research community. Rick Howard was a constant collaborator, thought leader and co-author on papers. Based on the initial success of the project, I recruited cadets to assist in the research. Eugene Gregory, Janette Gregory (not related), Ned Lavelle, Ben Ring, and Christa Chewar joined the project and we jointly built an adaptive interface based on learning styles (Ned), virtual computer simulation (Ben), and serious gaming using the Doom gaming engine (John and Janet). Ben and Christa worked on a military-focused variant of the project to build Army virtual libraries and media-rich field manuals with FM 100-5. Joe Adams joined as co-researcher as I was getting ready to leave and make significant contributions as well. Let’s examine each of these research projects.
The initial research project had a straightforward hypothesis: Could student education be enhanced through rich course pages on the world wide web? While it seems obvious today, in 1993 there were as many skeptics as there are were when calculators were introduced to the classroom. West Point formed a committee which in 1974 recommended that cadets be issued a calculator starting in 1975. As an aside, West Point issued me (class of 83) a calculator and a slide rule because you could never trust the “black box” of a calculator. It might run out of power. This mirrors today’s debate on the use of artificial intelligence in education. It seems the debate will be eternal between those educators who believe the goal of education is critical thinking, those who see education as a filling of the mind with the necessary information to do certain tasks, and those who see education as some balance of the two opposing views. I am firmly in the camp of critical thinking as it creates the capacity to learn any job. To me, Plutarch’s quote on the mind captured why I thought the world wide web could enhance cadet education:
“A mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.”
Plutarch, On Listening to Lectures
The cadets loved the new course and the department leadership saw the potential of the approach. CS383 Information Systems was an elective course and overnight it became a very popular elective course. The answer to the hypothesis was a resounding yes. This led to a number of different hypotheses that were explored at about the same time.
Bloom Taxonomy and Transparent Learning
Bloom’s Taxonomy remains a popular teaching approach since its introduction in 1956 and revision in 2001. In 1993, Rick Howard and I were interested in two different hypotheses:
- Rick’s research focused on using Bloom’s Taxonomy to structure course learning objectives within a single course and between multiple related courses so as to progress towards the higher levels of learning within the taxonomy.
- My research focused on the effectiveness of explicitly telling the students you are using Bloom’s Taxonomy, color-coding the learning objectives by the taxonomy, and being transparent on assessments of which level of the taxonomy you were evaluating.
Both research initiatives were well-received in the peer review process and were published as part of the ACM SIGCSE conference. This was in 1995. It is disappointing to me that Bloom’s Taxonomy is widely used in K-12 and enjoys only a small minority of professors due to, “the different pathways to becoming a college educator, which often do not include formal training in teaching“.
Why do different pathways to becoming a college educator not include formal training in teaching?
Learning Styles and Learning
The hypothesis was based on the premise that people learn differently. If we could determine their learning style, could we present to the learner educational activities most aligned with how they preferred to learn? This approach was novel in the early 1990s thus we explored it using web technology.
The method was straightforward: Assess the student’s learning style on lesson one through a web form and use the results to weight different tools and paths through the course material. The student was always in charge and could use or reject the advise of the expert system. By this point, we had build 18 different sets of tools for learning material in the course ranging from simple text to a doom educational game. The assessment was based on Felder and Silverman learning style model which had been initially proposed in 1988. We were the first to incorporate it into an expert system, host it on the world wide web, and try to explicitly guide the students.
End of course surveys and interactions with cadets showed great enthusiasm for the multiple tools and pathways. When asked to rate the most effective and least effective tool in the course, every tool was rated the best every semester by at least one student. Every tool was rated the worst every semester by at least one student. Students learn differently. When we delved into the student interactions with the system, the disciplined, highly intelligent cadets at West Point were exploring all of the tools and pathways gaining a deeper mastery of the course material.
When asked to rate the most effective and least effective tool in the course, each of the 18 tools was rated the best every semester by at least one student. Each tool was rated the worst every semester by at least one student. Students learn differently.
Course Survey Results, CS383 Information Systems
Learning styles remain pervasive and popular theory despite having been has been debunked. For me, it was and remains a eye-opening moment. Students learn differently and value different tools and approaches. Some like PowerPoint. Some hate it. This led to a related exploration into what is now known as serious gaming.
Doom, Serious Gaming, and Serious Learning
The computer game Doom came out in December 1993 and was a wildly popular game. I reached out to the creator of the game, id Software about the idea of using the game to give team-based college quizzes. The research hypothesis was could gaming enhance education given the surging popularity of computer games. id Software was enthusiastic about research and sent fifty copies of the game to support the research as well as a commitment to provide additional resources as necessary.
As a proof of concept, I created an exact replica of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS). The floor plan was exactly the same with professor names on all their doors. The typical Doom background music had been replaced with Ave Maria providing a ethereal ambient soundscape as all hell was viscerally unleashed. The monster sound files had been replaced with computer science sayings like: garbage in, garbage out; last in, first out; and, your class paper – I shredded that for you. It was one of the most unfair Doom level that required exceptional skill due to mob density and the difficulty of those mobs. The department leadership was strongly supportive of the endeavor and I sensed they had played it several times. The administrative assistants loved their role as research paper shredding, machine gun wielding instruments of death. I recruited Cadets Eugene and Janette Gregory (not related) to assist me through their CS489 independent studies classes.
There were two complimentary research endeavors:
- Janette worked on build a 50 question quiz for CS383 Information Systems. Students would encounter a series of rooms each with four doors labeled A, B, C, and D representing the four possible answers to a question. If the student team answered correctly, they are rewarded with ammo, armor, and weapons. If they answered incorrectly, the resulting monster would be a challenge and like some mistakes, was intent to hunt you down and kill you. The quiz score was two points for each correct door answered minus one point for each incorrect door answered. If you died, you restarted. If you completed the quiz with a passing score, you went to the timed and incredibly unfair replica of the EECS department. Janette did a fantastic job working creatively and tirelessly to finish the project on schedule.
- Eugene worked on an automatic tool that would generate random quizzes and grade them. The professor could set the number of questions and a random maze with questions would be created with the answer key. The professor would share the questions and possible answers with the students. This required less creativity and more programing skill to complete. John was not even a computer science major (a language major) but he delivered an exceptional program that flawlessly generated random dungeons for giving a quiz. It is with a certain degree of pride to note that Eugene is now Colonel Eugene Gregory, the deputy head of the Department of Foreign Languages. He will be a general officer one day.
Reaction from the students was overwhelming. Overnight, I became a legend at West Point among the cadets. Cadets were determined to take the quiz over and over (and over again) to try to beat my time on the final level. Doom was their game and how dare an old, in their mind, dude in his 30s, have a faster time in the most unfair Doom level ever. I stoked the competition promising a pizza party for any team that beat my time. I paid for two pizza parties and inspired hundreds of hours of study as cadets mastered the quiz so they could get to that final level.
When I die, even if it 100 years from now, I will still know the answers to all questions on the Doom quiz. I did that quiz hundreds of times and the answers are etched into my soul.
Anonymous CS383 student
The reaction from the computer science community was less supportive. It was a research initiative ahead of its time. Professors were still trying to figure out Harvard Graphics and PowerPoint. I presented the initial paper at the 1996 ACM SIGCSE conference in Philadelphia. You might remember this conference as the first time a computer, Deep Blue, beat Gary Kasparov. Rick Howard and I remember this conference as we got stuck on the Jersey turnpike in a northeaster. It took us seven hours to make what was normally a two hour trip. We knew the weather was coming in but we had to see the conclusion of the chess match. I remain very proud of the research as an early explorer of serious gaming.
Virtual Computers
The hypothesis of this research was to explore experimental learning as cadets made changes on a complex and richly interconnected computer and worked to build the best possible computer at the lowest price. Cadet Ben Ring took on this project as his CS489 Independent Study. This required an exceptional level of programming expertise and Ben fully committed to this research endeavor. This was very immersive, interactive, and complex simulation using the most advanced web technologies available at the time. We found that some cadets love to experiment and tinker with systems to really understand how they work. As a result, the CS383 virtual computer enjoyed strong support from a subset of the students in the course.
Adaptive Student Response System
Web technology provided a convenient venue for adaptive evaluation. The system would measure the difficulty of each question over time. Assessments would start with an average difficulty question and then adjust the difficulty of subsequent questions based if the student was answering question correctly or incorrectly. The hypothesis was that adaptive evaluation would more accurately measure the knowledge level of the students. The adaptive nature of the student response system fit in well with the other components of the course.
Course Digital Library
One of the more interesting initiatives in the course was the creation of a course library of the anonymized work of previous students with the grade. The hypothesis is that the course digital library would help students understand the paper rigor expected at each grade point. It succeeded in that goal and we did not have any issues associated with plagiarism. It was a course component that helped with communication of common expectations between students and the professor.
Army Executives for Software
You might be pondering at the odd series of nouns in the title. What does Army Executives for Software mean? Who exactly are army executives? Why are they for software and not for hardware or technology? What about firmware?
The Army realized that technology was rapidly becoming an essential element of strategic leadership. It was also clear that many of its senior leaders did not have even a basic understanding of technology. Thus the very militaristic sounding acronym ARES program (ARmy Executives for Software) was created. It was a safe environment for senior Army leaders to learn about technology and ask questions in a multiday retreat to West Point. I taught and answered questions on the world wide web.
First Learning Management Systems
In 1995, I built a learning management system to manage multiple courses. It was clear to me that colleges could not manage web-based courses depending on every instructor being able to build their own web pages. The system was intended for use only at West Point but could manage and publish an unlimited number of undergraduate courses. It saw some use at West Point in the EECS department and Math department. It was another big idea ahead of its time. The market would quickly evolve with companies like Desire2Learn and Canvas eventually dominating the learning management system space. Later in my career, I would implement Blackboard and Desire2Learn and teach within Canvas. In 2014, I received the global Leading Educator Award from Desire2Learn for my work asa thought leader in the learning management system space.
In Retrospect
My first tour as an instructor and assistant professor was very productive. I participated in four refereed journal papers, 19 refereed conference papers and five plenary presentations. I received about $5 million in research funding with almost all of it coming from the Department of Defense and specifically the Department of Army. I was well known at West Point and both the Math department and the EECS department were actively recruiting me to come back to West Point in a couple of years as a senior faculty member. There were no institutional teaching awards and instead, each of the 13 departments had an annual Academic Achievement Award for Excellence in Teaching and Research sponsored by the Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society. I won the award in 1996. I also won four best paper awards at conferences including the prestigious ASEE/ISEE Ben Dasher Best Paper Award in 1995 at the Frontiers in Education Conference.
I was able to implement institutional change through the first West Point website and enhancements to network building a reputation outside the department. I picked up some additional supporters across the Army in my work on digital libraries and the multimedia FM100-5 project.
On the Army front, I was selected to attend the Command and General Staff College. At this time, there were rounds of selection so when you were selected gave you a really good indication of where you were compared to your peers. My memory of the selection process was as follows. The rounds were early select (top 8-10%), first round (next 20%), and second round (next 20%). If you were an early select, you were competitive for everything. If you were in the first round you were competitive for command and possibly promotion to Colonel. If you were in the second round, you were competitive for LT Colonel but not competitive for command. If you were not selected, you may or may not make the next promotion. I was selected in first round and in the next ten years, would be promoted to Colonel.
I enjoyed the strong support and mentorship of COL Bill Lane, LTC Clark Ray, and MAJ Gene Ressler. I definitely tested some boundaries but that was becoming normal in my Army career and my mentors were effective in constructively helping me grow as a leader and an academic. Rick Howard introduced me to his classmate Dan Ragsdale and Dan and I would have many adventures together in the EECS department and as Vice Deans at West Point.
The next chapter in my Army career was about to begin with a move to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas to attend the Command and General Staff College. You can continue the military journey at the subsequent education of Major Carver.