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\title{Views of MIT's Project Athena: \\ Innovation or Invention?}
\author{Simson L. Garfinkel and Michael J. Saylor}
\markright{ DRAFT: Innovation vs. Invention. Garfinkel \& Saylor}
\maketitle


\begin{abstract}

In 1983 MIT initiated a five-year experiment to explore the uses of
computers in the undergraduate education called Project Athena.
This paper examines conflicts in MIT's Project Athena arising from
differing perceptions of involved participants. The paper concludes
that while the structure of the Project was predetermined by the
structure of MIT and the political and economic realities of the time,
many of the conflicts could have been avoided by early clarification
of the Project's goals and proposed methods.

\vspace{2pc}
{\Huge DRAFT2:\\}
\vspace{2pc}

\end{abstract}
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\begin{description}

\item[invention] {\it n} {\bf 1.} A product of the imagination; a new
idea, method or device.

\item[innovation] {\it n.} {\bf 1.} The introduction of a new idea,
method or device.

\end{description}

Without invention, innovation is impossible. Too often, invention is
mistaken for innovation. Before a technical change can be inacted in a
society, a new device must be invented, but technical innovation comes
about by the {\em deployment} of the device, not by its creation.

\section{Introduction}

Project Athena was announced in the Spring of 1983 as a five year
joint program between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT),
International Business Machines, Inc. (IBM) and the Digital Equipment
Corporation (DEC) to investigate new ways in which computers could be
used in undergraduate education.

It is hardly surprising that Project Athena arrived when it did.  IBM
and DEC forsaw great benefit from exposure of students to their newest
line of equipment. Society's expectations of computer potential had
grown to the point where the idea of computers in education had
massive popular appeal.  Finally, technical barriers in the
development of high performance, affordable graphics workstations were
about to be overcome.  In fact, Project Athena was just one of many
computers-on-campus experiments that popped up during this time
period.  Similar attempts at Brown, CMU, and Berkeley are indicative
of educators' desires to capitalize upon this new technology.

Characteristic of MIT, Project Athena adopted sought to develop and
use the most advanced technology forseeable in the near future. 
The very ambitious goals set at the beginning of the project have been
very difficult to meet. Expectations revolving the fulfillment of the
originally stated goals have led to conflict and dissatifaction. 

In a recent publication, the Project states:

\begin{quotation}

``Project Athena's goal is to improve the quality of education at MIT
by fostering innovative uses of a network of high performance,
graphics computer workstations.''\cite{athena-qa}

\end{quotation}

It is crucial to note that ``improving the quality of education...
with computers'' is far different from ``improving the quality of
education...with a network of high performance, graphics computer
workstations.''  In 1982, there were many computer systems which could
have been ``taken off the shelf'' and immediately applied to meet
educational needs.  By choosing to use so-called 3M technology (called
3M because the specifications call one million operations per second,
one million bytes of dynamic memory, and a one million pixel display),
Athena forced itself into the most ambitious posture feasible.  In
1983 the major vendors faced many technical difficulties to be
overcome with 3M machines.  Before any innovation could take place in
the classroom, substantial development had to be done on the hardware,
system software and course-specific software.  To complicate matters,
Project Athena's original mandate to foster innovative educational
practices using computers, and not experimental computer technologies,
made delays due to technical difficulties seem unacceptable,
unwarranted and unfair to many faculty and students.

	A university is composed of a multitude of actors.  At MIT,
each of these groups became a constituency complete with its own
perceptions of the process and interpretations of the words
``innovative uses of computing.'' One constitutency wanted to do it in
the most technically advanced manner possible.  Another wanted to see
immediate widescale deployment of computer power. A third group hoped
to use the initial progress of the Project as a publicity tool for
MIT. The innovation Project Athena proposed became a highly political
process. One constituency forced a goal requiring extensive technical
development which the Project continually attempted to de-emphasize in
order to avoid alienating others.


\vspace{2pc}

\begin{quotation}{\it
\begin{center}
{\large Consider the football analogy:}
\end{center}

\vspace{1pc}

You are a football coach, and through some stroke of luck, your school
has just been granted a workout facility containing only the most
modern state-of-the-art weightlifting and conditioning equipment from
the two leading manufacturers.  The faculty is concerned that too
little is being done to integrate new exercise machine technology into
the football curriculum. Your task is to ``explore new, innovative
uses of modern gym equipment in the football training curriculum.''

You could take the approach of a researcher, partitioning off one
small part of the new gym for use by the players in their regular
workout schedule, while keeping the rest of the gym off-limits.  Your
trained sports staff would then be able to develop those optimum
exercise routines making best use of this new equipment, using as
their subjects small groups of athletes.  Partitioning off the gym
would allow you to proceed with your experiment without fear of any
sophisticated tests being disrupted by traditional uses of the
equipment (e.g. players wanting to do the bench press) Of course, the
small section open to the rest of the team might be terribly crowded,
but that is to be expected.  Your program is an experiment, not a
service.  If the players want to do the bench press, they can join a
health club, or purchase their own personal barbell set.  There will
no doubt be complaints about all of the wasted equipment in the
experimental part of the gym. However the program will benefit those
players directly involved now and eventually all players of future football
teams.

}\end{quotation}

\vspace{3pc}

\section{A brief history of MIT's Project Athena}


Initially, Project Athena was divided into distinct phases. These
phases were predicated on the availability of computer hardware rather
than the state of development of specific educational software. In
{\bf Phase I}, Athena would install a campus-wide high-speed fiber
optic network and approximately 50 time sharing minicomputers (each
capiable of supporting between six to eight users at a time). Many
terminal rooms, called ``clusters,'' would be prepared across the MIT
campus.  A limited number of accounts would be made available for the
initial development and testing of educational software.

During {\bf Phase II}, initially scheduled to commence in Spring 1985,
the Project would be vastly expanded by the arrival of between one and
two {\em thousand} ``workstations.''\footnote{In 1983 the concept of a
workstation computer was under development by both IBM and DEC,
although other companies had been marketing similar computers for over
a year. A workstation is characteristically a very fast, graphics
oriented computer whose primary limiting constraint is a small (or
nonexistent) local disk drive for the storage of user files. Most
proposals for workstation-based computing environments presuppose
``fileservers'' -- large conventional computers connected to the
workstations {\em via} a high speed network -- to make up for this
deficiency.} Workstations would be single user computers, each
posessing the equivilent computing power of one or more of the Phase I
timesharing machines. As the workstations became available for general
use, the Phase I computers would be relegated to the task of file
serving.

In addition to the creation of the computational substructure, Project
Athena was designed to be an umbrella program for a campus-wide effort
to integrate the use of computers into the undergraduate program.
Departments, groups (both academic and student) and individual
professors were actively encouraged to submit proposals for projects
and programs to be developed during the five year period. Some
projects received funding for hiring development staff from Athena,
while other projects received merely the use of Athena facilities.

From the start, Project Athena has been faced by a number of setbacks
and delays, most of which were unanticipated. Setbacks in the
availability of workstations from both major venders have resulted in
installation and software development delays. The problems inherent in
maintaining and operating fifty timesharing machines were vastly
underestimated, as was the time and cost of wiring the campus with a
fiber optic network. The substantual amount of system software
development required by the project was not anticipated. Nevertheless,
by December 1986 over ten clusters had been installed and over 98
different curricular development programs have been established. Over
87 percent of MIT undergraduates of used Project
Athena\cite[p.9]{survey5}. In January 1987 Athena had installed
experimental clusters in two living groups.\footnote{Like most of
project Athena, living group installation has been delayed due to a
variety of technical, administrative and political problems.}



\section{Goals of this paper}

	The path of Project Athena has been erratic.  Throughout its
lifetime it has been fraught with controversy.  Even today, halfway
through the project, there exist some fundamental misunderstandings
between the various actors involved in the process.  It is our hope
that by carefully describing the process and its
interaction with the perceptions of the participants, we can both
explain the events which have occurred as
well as help mitigate the conflicts which are likely to take place
over projects similar to this one in the future.


\section{Actors}

Every group of people at MIT have a different a different perception
of the role, purpose, current state and goals of Project Athena. These
perceptions arise from differing motivations, requirements and
pressures which face these different actors.

\subsection{Students}

Student perceptions of Project Athena has been shaped by two main
forces: 1) direct student experience in the Project Athena clusters
and 2) published material by Project Athena. In a recent campus wide
survey of the MIT undergraduate student body conducted by Project
Athena, the pollsters learned:

\begin{quotation}

It should be noted that student comments and suggestions relate
primarily to the system they can already use, i.e. to Athena as it is
today and for the most part they view this system as a time-sharing
one. Comments on course-specific applications were sparese to
nonexistent. It will be interesting in the future to follow whether or
not what M.I.T., M.I.T. Information Systems and Athena itself labels
Athena is what, in fact, students think of or refer to. Students seem
to think of Athena primarily as their facility (exemplified by W20)
for laboratory reports, papers, mail, and other
activities.\cite[p.17]{survey5} 

\end{quotation}

\paragraph{Student Experience}

To this day, the primary function of Project Athena for most students
remains word processing.\footnote{65 percent of students use Project
Athena for word processing and 46 percent use Project Athena for
electronic mail. Only 31 percent use it for solving problem
sets.\cite[p.14]{survey5}} Although for many students at MIT the
writing of papers represents a minor part of their educational
experience while in college, it still represents a major hurdle which
must be overcome.

We believe that few students want to use computers to learn more
material or the current selection
course material better; instead, most students would rather use
computers to accomplish the same amount of course work in less time.

Students associate the phrase ``Project Athena'' far more closely with
the Student Center cluster than they do with individual Project Athena
coursework development efforts. This is even true of students who have
taken courses sponsored by Project Athena and have used other
clusters. One explaination is that a student's contact with the
Student Center cluster extends beyond the tenure of the student's
enrollment in a particular Athena class.

\paragraph{Athena Publicity}

Project Athena has engaged in several publicity campaign aimed
directly at students. 

In March 1985 a four-page advertising supplement to {\em The
Tech}\footnote{The MIT Student Newspaper} Project Athena announced
``{\bf The Grand Opening} on March 19, 1985 of the Student Center
Cluster [emphasis in original]\cite{athena-supplement-1}.'' The insert
was designed to stimulate student interest and use of the Student
Center cluster.  It is littered with phrases such as ``{\em The Student
Center is for You},'' ``{\em take advantage of the opportunity you have, as
an MIT undergraduate, to obtain computer resources free of charge},''
and ``{\em Project Athena has something for everybody}.'' Not surprisingly,
the major use of the Student Center which the insert advocates is word
processing; the insert mentions ten ``minicourses'' which the Project
will be offering for novice users: four are introductions for people
with no experience, four are introductions to using the text processor
(EMACS) and two are toutorials on using the text formatter (SCRIBE).

Project Athena's insert and other publicity generated a demand which
the resources of the Student Center were not able to satisfy. In the
September 1986 an article was published in an insert in {\em Tech
Talk}\footnote{The official newspaper of MIT} telling students what
not to expect from Project Athena.\cite{what-its-not} This article
stresses that ``Project Athena is {\em not} a service [emphasis in
original].''\footnote{In January 1987 at a panel discussion on the
effects of MIT's Project Athena, Director Steve Lerman admitted that
the early publicity campaign advocating text processing in the Student
Center was ``definately a mistake.''\cite{panel}}

This article was largely in response to a change in student attitudes
about project Athena between Spring 1985 and Spring 1985:

\begin{quotation}

``[P]eople stopped thinking about Athena as an experiemnt and started
thinking about it as a service. And what is interesting about that is
that I don't think Athena thinks that it has gotten there yet. And the
problem is that...  a whole lot of these lists of [student gripes] are
things that you would tolerate in an experiment and you don't
tolerate in a service. It is a very difficult problem for Athena at
this point to start behaving like a service, because its really not
capable of doing that for any number of
reasons.\cite{jackson-interview}''

\end{quotation}

\subsection{Faculty}

The single most significant pressure on an MIT faculity member is the
requirement to perform high calibre research in order to be awarded
tenure. Tenure committees select professors who are principally
interested in conducting research rather than teaching.
Even after a professor attains tenure the pressure continues,
fueled by the need to preserve status and funding within the
community. It is not surprising that many of the faculty Athena
programs resemble research projects, even projects of professors
who are genuinely concerned about undergraduate education.

At this point, every department in the Institute has had at least one
project using Project Athena.  Faculty Athena projects have adopted
two main strategies in attempting to integrate Project Athena in the
undergraduate curriculum: a) using existing software and tools as they
are made available, and b) attempting to develop their own software.

In the programming courses which are taught on Project Athena, no
special software beyond the basic UNIX operating system has been
presented to the students. In some courses, such as ``Introduction to
Chemical Engineering (10.01),'' students have been given particular
problem sets structured around commonly available number crunching
programs. These program include RS/1\footnote{A program for analyzing
and plotting laboratory data sold by Bolt Beranek and Newman},
20/20\footnote{A spreadshead program sold by Access Technology, Inc},
and macsyma\footnote{A program for symbolically manipulating algebraic
expressions, sold by Symbolics, Inc.}. Project Athena has been slow to
encourage and offer support to students wishing to use these programs
in other courses.

Other professors have chosen to write their own special-purpose
``courseware'' for use on Project Athena. The degrees of success in
these efforts vary, and most of them are far from over.  \footnote{29
percent of the use of Athena in courses is in the form of lecture
demonstrations or reinforcement. Additionally, computers are rarely
used to introduce new concepts to students.\cite[p.21]{survey5}}
Faculty sponsoring athena courses which develop special-purpose
software have been reluctant to additionally incorporate the generally
available number crunchers.

The majority of MIT faculity has not attempted to obtain the resources
for their students to use Project Athena programs and facilities, even
though use of the commonly available word processing and number
crunching programs could be of great benefit to the students involved.

\subsection{Project Athena Staff}

The primary tasks of Athena's staff have been acquiring additional
equipment and funding, constructing and operating the system, and
providing technical assistance to faculty. Although members of the
Project staff emphasize the development of course-specific
applications in their statements, problems in systems development and
operations often overshadow other concerns. 

The primary goal of the project's staff has been the creation of a
working system, capable of sustaining intensive university-wide
access. The staff wants to please the MIT community, a comunity
consisting of administration, students and faculity. The staff must
make the Project look good to the outside world, both as general
publicity for MIT and so that they can raise additional funds requiried
by the project. The staff has the responsibility of reporting to and
pleasing the corporate sponsors of the Project.

Of all the players involved, the staff is at the focal point
of concerns and questions about Athena. For example, students most
closely associate the actions of the Athena staff with the Project's
success or failure, rather than the actions of the involved faculity,
corporate sponsors or administration. The staff is additionally the
contact point between MIT and the rest of the world on matters
regarding Athena.

\subsection{MIT Administration}

MIT, like most private universities, is a ``controlled
anarchy.''\cite{****} The Institute is made up of a number of
independent autonomous departments, laboratories and research
projects. Power to enact educational reform is dispersed among a
number of different semi-autonomous faculty committees which report
back to the faculty as a whole.

To the extent that the aministration is concerned with educational
policy, it is mainly in a consensus building role. What the
administration does have a direct effect on is the Institute's image:
alumni, fundraising, corporate relations -- the public's perception of
what those departments and laboratories are actually doing.

The administaration's goal with respect to Project Athena has been to
present the Project to the public in the most favorable light
possible. This means accentuating Athena's technical and educational
breakthroughs, stressing the ground breaking nature of MIT's
initiative. Traditional applications of computer technology (word
processing, spread sheets, databases) are of little value in publicity.

The result is that when asked what student perceptions of Project Athena
are, Paul E. Gray, President of MIT replies that he doesn't
know.\cite{gray-interview}

What Dr. Gray does know is what the corporate sponsors and what other
college presidents think about this project, and that is just one more
element that tends to push Athena out of the realm of the innovative
and into the realm of the inventive. Innovations add little to the
prestige of MIT: there is nothing unique about being innovative.

\subsection{Sponsors}

The goals of the sponsors were to cultivate a generation of engineers
familiar with their equipment and their hardware. Secondly, the
vendors wanted to take advantage of the technical expertise of MIT to
make 3M workstations usable and desirable to universities and
business. The sponsors additionally benefitted from the percieved good
will towards educational institutuions. The pre-1987 tax advantage of
making donation to an educational institutuion should not be understated.

\subsection{General Public -- rest of world}

For the most part, the general public's impression of Project Athena
has been shaped by a varitety of publications written about Project
Athena. Additionally, a lesser number of individuals have toured the
facilities in the course of Institute and Project sponsored events.

Most of the initial descriptions of Project Athena appeared in the
computer press -- consequentially, these descriptions tended to stress
the technical objectives of the Project -- namely, the campus-wide
high speed network, the use of 3M workstations, and the sheer
magnitude of the undertaking. The remainder of the articles describing
Project Athena have been concerned with long range educational visions;
little is mentioned of the Project's short term practical goals and
technical problems.

The tour of MIT conducted by the MIT Information Office takes the
group of visitors, perspective students and parents down a central
corridor at the Institute and pauses before a Project Athena cluster.
The tour guide says that Project Athena is a five year program to
experiment in the uses of computers in education, and advises
perspective students against purchasing their own computer before
coming to MIT -- ``You'll be able to do all of your wordprocessing on
Project Athena,'' the tour guide says. The publicity stresses the Athena 
goal of unlimited undergraduate access to high performance graphics
workstations. Although these statements are not necessarily being made
by representatives of Project Athena, there is little difference in
the minds of outside visitors.
	
\section{MIT: Innovation becomes invention}

Ideally, invention occures in an isolated, controlled environment. An
invention exists wether or not it has any effect on the external
environment. Indeed, it is when an invention corsses over that line
and begins to affect the world around it that it is reclassified as an
innovation.  It is possible for a successful invention to be a failed
innovation, but a failed invention cannot possibly be a successful
innovation.  We can propose a continuum proceeding from pure invention
at one pole to pure innovation at the other, with external
ramifications and effects increasing as a process approaches pure
innovation.

	Project Athena consists of many initiatives, all of them
falling on a different part of this continuum.  For simplicity,
consider the triad of infrastructural components necessary for
educational computation.  The first leg of this triad is hardware:
Without a functioning workstation, there can be no Project Athena.
MIT's decision to utilize 3M technology (which was still in the late
development phase at the start of Athena) caused the project to be
burdened with continual delivery delays.

	The second leg of the Athena triad is system software.  Window
systems, coherent operating systems, and accounts administration
software are all essential to establish and maintain a campus-wide
system.  Yet, a project of this magnitude, let alone one utilizing 3M
workstations, had never been attempted before.  Many systems that
operate with a few computers and a few hundred users do not
successfully scale to systems of thousands of computers and five
thousand users.  Athena was forced to develop many of these essential
building blocks itself.  A good deal of non-educationally related
invention was necessary from the start.

	The final leg of the triad consists of the course-specific
software (courseware).  This is the individual module which teaches
French to the student, or interfaces with a data acquisiton device in
the lab, or allows the student to use his machine as a word processor.
Writing this software is what Project Athena announced to the rest of
the world as the goal of the project.  Besides a few word processors
and spreadsheet programs, almost none of this was present at the
beginning of the project.

	These three components, progressing from hardware to software
to courseware, form not only a triad but a pyramid.  Without
innovation at the previous level, invention at the next is impossible.
It is impossible to completely develop a window system without the
workstation, and it is equally impossible to develop the finalized
teaching module of the form Project Athena intended to without the
window system.  Of course, software development is done in parallel
where possible, but innovation requires all of the composite elements
to be present. By selecting such an ambitious set of goals, Athena
forced itself to undertake major developments at both the software and
courseware levels, even as it was delayed by late development of the
hardware.

	In itself, there is nothing objectionable about this approach
to incorporating computers into the classroom.  However, {\em Project
Athena has created problems for itself emphasizing its innovative
rather than inventive nature in its publicity to students, faculty,
and the general public.}

\begin{quotation}

Athena is first and foremost an educational project whose mission is
not necessarily to invent new things in computer science, but to
explore the value of advanced networked workstations -- a relatively new
technology -- throughout MIT's curricula.  To the extent that Athena
involves innovations in computer science, the innovations are not ends
in themselves, but are included because they are important to the
ultimate educational goals of the project.\cite{lerman-educom}

\end{quotation}

Paul Gray is quite emphatic on this matter:

\begin{quotation}

``I do not think of, [nor did] the faculty who are involved in the
idea of developing Athena, ... think of Athena as in any sense a
research project. That was clear from the beginning.

``The faculity in the Institute, whether they be in LCS or EECS or the
Sloan school or wherever, did not see this as an interesting,
important researchable topic. This was a project in appliations. It
involved a substantual amount of development.... [W]hen the network is
complete, and we have all that hardware here and the money, it will
represent probably the largest scale undertaking of that kind
anywhere, in terms of both number of machines and the bandwidth of the
network.\cite{gray-interview}''

\end{quotation}

Typical of Gray's statement, however, most detailed descriptions of
what Project Athena intended to do describe the underlying computer
hardware rather than the applications development. Athena's public
image portray's it as more heavily innovative than it actually is.
Most of the spokemen involved appear to ignore the physical necessity
of doing product development before offering it for public
consumption. Long term goals may be innovative ones, but invention
must take place first.

In general, most of the articles released to the general public have
phrased computer infrastructure breakthroughs as educational
breakthroughs.  A 1985 article published with Lerman's consent in PC
Week refers to ``...11 public clusters in various class buildings and
one in the student center\cite{pcweek}.'' The article continues ``Now
that most academic areas have public clusters, the `living groups' or
dorms and other housing will get microcomputers.''

In truth, even now only the student center is truly a ``public''
cluster.  All other facilities have been used primarily for software
development or class exercises -- general use is prevented by a
variety of security measures, including combination locks and
limitation of accounts.

	After its first three years, very little educational
innovation has emerged from Project Athena. As mentioned above, only
one cluster consisting of some 40 terminals is open to the student
body with thousands of students competing for the use of this cluster.
A major portion of the effort of Athena staffers has gone toward the
development of the necessary software for the maintenance of a campus
net as well as defeating the numerous technical and bureaucratic
difficulties which have arisen along the way. 

Finally, most courseware sits solidly in the developmental phase.
According to Athena's own figures, only 15 percent of MIT
undergraduate coursework involves any Athena exercises, with 29
percent only being used for demostrations or reinforcement. With the
exception of those courses which taught programming before Athena
arrived, we see few examples where Athena has become an integral part
of the subject's curriculum.  This is a far cry from the goal of
integrating ``modern computer and communications capabilities into
{\em all} phases of the education process.''\cite[emphasis
added]{projects}


\subsection{Student Center}

The MIT Student Center is a large, general-purpose building in the
center of the MIT campus. During the summer of 1984 roughly one third
of the fifth floor library was rennovated to make room for a Project
Athena Cluster. The Student Center cluster is the largest Athena
cluster, in terms of floor space, number of terminals and intensity
of use. 

The Student Center is the only cluster available to students not
enrolled in a special Athena-sponsored subject. Unfortunately, it
provides users with the poorest quality of service: the timesharing
computers regularly operate at a factor of {\em five to ten} times
slower than machines in the other clusters.  Accounts in the Student
Center are given disk space storage quotas of
250~KBytes\footnote{enough space to store approximately 30 pages of
text.}; accounts elsewhere have quotas of 2500~KBytes. Students often
have to wait in line to use a terminal in this cluster while terminals
and computers in other clusters sit idle. Sadly, for many students the
Student Center is the only computer resource (Athena or otherwise)
available to them at MIT.

\subsection{Fishbowl}

All of MIT spreads out from a central hallway called ``The Infinite
Corridor.'' Every day, thousands of students, faculty and visitors to
the Institute walk past the ``Fishbowl,'' a large Project Athena
terminal room on the Infinite Corridor.

The Fishbowl gets it name from the large glass windows it has for
walls. Strategically located at a major intersection on the Infinite
Corridor, every visitor and tour of the Institute passes the Fishbowl
and peers in at the computers and the people.\footnote{For example, A
large, \$5-thousand wood cut sign proclaims the words ``Project
Athena.'' to visitors walking down the infinite corridor.} To many
visitors, the Fishbowl represents Project Athena, the students and
faculty inside the Fishbowl represent typical users of the Athena
system.  The irony is that, with the exception of a small and
privileged group, the great majority of MIT students are not permitted
to use the Fishbowl. Like many other clusters (with the exception of
the Student Center), the Fishbowl is frequently nearly empty.

The Fishbowl was one of the first Project Athena clusters; it was
operational in the Spring of 1984. Only equipment from the Digital
Equipment Corporation is present in the cluster, because it was the
only cluster that was present when the cluster was installed.  Faculty
members from outside the School of Engineering walking by the Fishbowl
have been continually reminded that while Digital delivered some
equipment early in the experiment, IBM did not meet its original
commitements. 

The highly visible concentration of computer equipment which the
fishbowl contains is representative of Athena's skewed objectives in
the eyes ofthe students. The fishbowl is often nearly empty, reminding
students of Athena's inability or unwillingness to eventually
distribute the high use of the Student Center to other clusters.

\subsection{Student Stratification}

Project Athena has divided the students at MIT, like Gaul, into three
parts. The defining characteristic of each of these strata is their
accessibility to the Athena system. Every student at MIT has access to
a personal account in the Student Center; students who are enrolled in
Athena sponsored subjects receive an additional account, outside of
the Student Center, for ``coursework;'' students who are employed
directly by Project Athena as consultants, staff or programmers
recieve accounts on every Athena machine.

There is nothing unique in the annals of academic computing in the
creation of a privileged class of students out of those employed by
the computer center. What is unique about Project Athena is that it
``rewards'' students who are taking particular athena-sponsored
subjects with a resource whose utility is applicable to all of the
students other subjects and the use of which is
unrestricted.\cite{jackson-interview} 

For example, other schools which provide computer accounts to students in
programming courses specifically forbid students from using those
accounts for word processing.\footnote{A student at the
Brown University Wang Computer Lab who uses a course account for word processing
risks losing the account.} Because Project Athena saw itself as
supplying students with a general purpose, broad-based computing
facility, it did not wish to label any use of the system as
illigitimate,\cite{jackson-interview} as it could by restricting word
processing to the Student Center Cluster.
On the contrary, Project Athena
has encouraged the use of the system for word processing by offering
``minicourses'' teaching students how to do wordprocessing on the
system and by providing laser printers to print out the final
papers. Thus, a student who received an account in the Building 66
cluster for a course in introductory computer programming was
encouraged to use that same account to write humanities papers.

Unless a student is using a computer to play games or send mail,
students are using computers for coursework. Project Athena's policy
of restricting use of certain clusters to ``Athena courses''
discriminates against students enrolled in courses which the Project has not
specifically sponsored.

In an attempt to out-step the limits of their class, there exists a
significant number of students who register for Athena-sponsored
subjects solely to obtain the Athena accounts which the subjects
provide. These students cancel the courses a few weeks into the term.
No good system exists to curtail this practice.

\subsection{Courseware}

	One of the major goals of Project Athena has been the
development of innovative educational courseware.  Seven of the
fourteen million raised so far has been allocated for courseware
development.  This courseware falls into three categories: specific
tools, general tools, and teaching modules.

	Specific tools are programs which operate experiments or
facilitate data acquisition.  IBM PC's provided by Athena have found
their way into many of MIT's undergraduate labs.  One procedure in the
Chemistry Department's Advanced Chemical Instrumentation course (5.33)
which used to require over five hours is now performed in minutes with
the aid of a computer package funded by Project Athena.  Utilized in
this straightforward manner, computers have saved students thousands
of hours of mindless manipulation.  However, most of these
applications are neither equipment nor software intensive.  Further,
most data acquisition routines are not unique -- there has been a ready
market for years. As a result, specific tools have not been a major
focus of Athena courseware development.

	General tools are programs such as word processors,
spreadsheets, and graphics packages.  Like many specific tool
applications, most of these programs have general appeal and have
already been developed.  Athena has not developed any general tools,
although it has encouraged their use both in the Student Center and in
several courses. However, only the Student Center is available for
word processing or general number crunching.

	Most of the money earmarked by Athena for courseware
development has funded the development of teaching modules.  These are
futuristic programs meant to demonstrate some concept or process which
is difficult to convey with normal teaching techniques.  Specific
examples range from ``virtual laboratories'' to ``fancy calculators.''
Because all of these modules are subject-specific and the concept is
new, there has been little development of these modules elsewhere.
Module development has been primarily a process of invention.  This
process has been very equipment and labor intensive. The focus of most
of the modules developed has not been to decrease student workload,
but rather to teach something better than before, or to teach
something never taught before.  Student views of these modules range
from uneasy tolerance to total disgust.\footnote{In a recent Project
Athena student survey, ``Comments on course-specific applications were
sparse to nonexistent.''\cite{survey5} However, informal contact
between the authors and a wide segment of the MIT undergraduate body
confirms this statement.} Because many of these modules are still in
the developmental phase, used in classroom demonstrations or isolated
exercises, most students tend to view them as superfluous.

	The most fascinating aspect courseware development is the way
in which Athena's actions in the realm of software have resembled the
general goals of the entire project.  Most courseware development has
focused upon the most ambitious task possible -- the creation of
teaching modules. Innovation has been sacrificed for invention.
Module development is funded on a yearly basis, and continued funding
requires a written proposal. It is insightful to note that these
proposals are not submitted by educators, but ``Co-Principal
Investigators.''\footnote{The title implies both how the professors
view their role -- as researchers, rather than educators -- and that
educational innovation is expected from these projects, but not before
a great deal of research has been done.}

	The reasons for such ambitious software goals are embedded in
the same perceptions which so greatly influenced the hardware
decisions.

\begin{itemize}

\item[a] {\bf MIT's Mentality:}

There is nothing special about word processors or data acquisition
systems. The kind of teaching modules Project Athena hopes to write
have never been developed before.

\item[b] {\bf MIT Academic Incentives:}

In tenure decisions, research and not teaching is the first priority.
The development of a successful module is a tangible creation, similar
to a successful research project. True educational innovations are
intangible, they have no permanence and they cannot be quoted or
referenced.  Further, educational innovation in the MIT classroom does
nothing to increase MIT's prestige in the rest of the scientific
world. (If Project Athena's software is used in the rest of the
scientific world, it is {\em invention} which the Project will be
exporting, not {\em innovation.})

\item[c] {\bf Faculty Bias:}

Since the courseware development program is
very decentralized, it has no character of it's own.  Courseware
developed will tend to reflect the biases of the faculty.  Since most
of the faculty are self-selected researchers, they tend to view things
in an inventive rather than innovative light.  

\item[d] {\bf Athena's Technical Bias:}

It is impossible for a humanities professor to declare his subject an
``Athena class'' and get accounts on restricted clusters for his
students to write their papers on, although this is certainly an
academic use.  Athena's definition of innovative uses discourages
using computers to do something better but already known; it
encourages the use of computers for something new. Thus, in the
competition for resources, word processing doesn't have the same
appeal as a fluids module which demonstrates dimensional analysis,
even though the utility of the former is certain.

\end{itemize}

\section{Alternatives to Project Athena}

What could MIT have done besides Project Athena? Could MIT's
experiment in the uses of computers in undergraduate education have
been phrased any differently?

\subsection{Alternative \#1: Personal Computers}

It is not immediately clear what educational role a campus-wide fiber
optic network serves, although the network is invariably mentioned in
any formal or informal description of Project Athena. Electronic mail
and instantaneous communication with other users of the system are
fun, but they are also expensive distractions.  Many of Athena's goals
could have been satisfied if students carried their files with them on
floppy disks or tapes, although such a system would have made the
distribution of software and the management of the vast equipment
resources much more difficult.

A logical extension of this approach would be to base MIT's
educational innitiative on off-the-shelf personal
computers such as the IBM PC/AT. Several schools have adopted this
strategy (although most have adopted Apple's Macintosh computer rather
than the PC/AT),
requiring ever entering student to purchase the same computer. Special
deals between the school and the manufacturer allow students to
purchase the computers at substantial discounts.

	Athena could still have developed fancy educational ``courseware;''
when a professor wanted to incorporate a program into a subject, he
would distribute floppy disks containing the program which students
could run either in public clusters or in the privacy of their own
rooms.

	This approach would have substantially minimized Project
Athena's operational expenses, since students would have operated and
maintained their own computers. However, this approach would also have
locked students into an obsoleting hardware base and required all
programs developed during the project to run on any piece of hardware
ever sold to students.

\subsection{Alternative \#2: A campus-wide system of timesharing
computers}

	Project Athena was divided into two ``phases.'' The first
phase was the creation of a campus-wide network and the installation
of approximatley 50 VAX 11/750s. Phase II, which is just now starting,
is the deployment of ``workstations'' around campus and the migration
of user accounts from the timesharing computers to the workstations.

	The goal of using workstations has dictated the form and
intensity of much of Athena's system development. A significant effort
was required in order to make workstations usable. From the beginning,
faculty and students have been told to view their accounts on the
timesharing systems as transitionary. The effort spent by Project
Athena to make the computational enviornment better was limited
because the first generation of equipment was going to be soon
replaced.

	As an alternative, the MIT computers-in-education program
could have been based solely on currently available timesharing
system. This unexplored project could have upgraded or replaced its
11/750s with Digital's newest line of VAXes (the 8600 and 8800
series). These computers can support between four and ten times as
many users; they would have solved Athena's overcrowding and
performance problems. Such a decision would have been a statement that
the project's sole goal was educational development, rather than to
develop a triad of untried hardware, new systems software and
educational software.

\subsection{Alternative \#3: Research only}

	Another option for research in computers and education at MIT
could have been just that: keep the project a research project,
without directly affecting current students. The pay-off of the
project would be several years away, in the form of software,
textbooks, and entire curriculums which would be published and used
at other univerties and high schools.

	Students would be involved in the project to the extent that
students are needed to test software and to be experimented on, but
there would be no large-scale cluster such as the Student Center to
unrealistically raise student expectations.

	Some students would argue that, with the exception of the
Student Center, project Athena is a ``research only'' project.
Some publications by the Project have reinforced this goal. The
difference is that a {\em stated} goal of Project Athena is
educational innovation; the stated goal of a research project would be
solely software development without intended wide-scale use within the
MIT community.

	From the perspective of the outside world, it does not matter
if Athena affects every student at MIT or just a few. What matters is
how much of the Athena software gets from MIT to the rest of the
world. Of far secondary concern is how the project affects the caliber
of students which MIT graduates during the five years of the
experiment.

	A research-only project would have had greater flexibility,
since it would not be important to consider wide-scale implementation
of the programs developed.  Many more of the applications could have
grown beyond the limits of the ``standard Athena workstations.''
Although parts of Project Athena do match these descriptions, they are
currently in the minority.

\subsection{Alternative \#4: No campus-wide program}

	Without Project Athena, computers still would have been
integrated into the non-engineering aspects of the MIT curriculumn,
but at a much slower pace. Some of the current participants in the
Project might have been better off if they had waited two or five
years before embarking on their programs in order to allow the
computational environment time to settle.

\section{Conclusions}

\begin{quotation}{\it

\begin{center}
{\large Return to the football analogy:}
\end{center}
\vspace{1pc}

	What if the original lack of integration of new
exercise equipment is simply due to scarcity of that equipment?

	  Consider what might happen if the coach were to open the new
facilities to all the players, without first developing the optimum
exercise routines.  The staff could instead concentrate on giving all
of the players more individual attention and encouraging them all to
become familiar with the equipment.  In time, players themselves may
begin to develop new exercise routines.  With so many more people
familiar with the equipment, there will probably be a flurry of new
ideas that the staff never would have considered. The time saved not
having to wait to use the equipment may allow the players to perform a
greater variety of exercises in a shorter amount of time, which may in
turn result in a stronger football team with a superior attitude.
Success may come much sooner than it will under a ``research only''
policy, eliciting with it widespread popular support for the use of
modern equipment in football training.

Eventually, the coach may find that the team's marginal improvement
due to the use of known exercise routines has peaked.  The coach may
decide to embark on a program to develop even more effective workout
methods. However, it is quite possible that the team can improve more
by investment in some other aspect of their training.  The goal of the
jproject, after all, is to improve team performance, not to improve
the utilization of high tech exercise equipment.



}\end{quotation}


\subsection{Requirements for success}

Will Project Athena be a success? In order for the project to succeed,
all of following criteria must be satisfied:

\begin{itemize}

\item 3M workstations must work.

\item The technical barriers to establishing a network of workstations
must be overcome.

\item The faculty must develop courseware.

\item The faculty must {\em use} the courseware they have developed.

\item Students must accept the courseware.

\item Students must learn from the courseware.

\end{itemize}

This is a very impressive set of requirements. Any alternative that
MIT could have chosen for its computers in undergraduate education
experiment would have reduced the chances for failure and increased
the immediate innovative value. Such a program would also have
decreased the amount of technical development necessary and decreased
the amount of prestige derived from the project.

\subsection{Stressing educational aspects}

	Athena is an ambitious long-term project with a
potentially staggering payback.  Yet, many of its proponents seem
determined to focus attention on its educationally innovative aspects
rather than its technical inventions.  This is partly due to the
conflicts between the perceptions of the participants and the dynamics
of their interactions. Innovative uses of computers in education is a cause
everyone can rally behind:

\begin{itemize}

\item For the general public, this is the long awaited next step
in mankind's development.  Anything done with a computer is almost by
definition better.  (Consider the popular commercial depicting a
mother who genuinely fears for her son's educational future because he
has not got a computer.)  So long exploited by the intelligent,
computers have since become synonomous with intelligence.

\item For the major vendors, educational innovation opens up an
entirely new market.  The potential profits are substantial.  In
addition, since the general public prefers to hear about all of the
wonderful things that computers will eventually do (instead of the
current technical difficulties involved in interfacing 2000
workstations), it is far better for these companies' public relations
to emphasize the final product.

\item For MIT, advantages of emphasizing educational aspects over
developmental ones come from a variety of sources.  At MIT especially,
and nationwide to a lesser extent, there is a current atmosphere of
educational reform. Computer
science at MIT is old news, computers for education is shiny and new.

Finally, emphasis of Athena's educational aspect may be reaction to
prevent any conscription of Athena's capacity by any of the many
computer-starved or computer science development groups at MIT.  As
Lerman says, ``This could easily become a computer-science playpen,
but it won't.''\cite{pcweek}

\item The student body is in favor of educational innovation for
obvious reasons.  In the short term, innovation to them means easier
access to terminals for word processing, programming, data analysis,
etc. allowing them to complete there assignments faster and better.
In the far future, the development of teaching modules symbolizes the
advent of a panacea for all of the shortcomings of the current
educational process.  In any event, they are the designated
benefactors, and just like any heir, they want their inheritance now.

\end{itemize}

	All of the parties involved with Project Athena recognize that
it is an experiment.  The laboratory is MIT, and the subject is the
student body.  This is ethically acceptable in the case of an attempt
at educational innovation.  But presented as a testbed for various
educational uses of computers which are unlikely contribute in a
substantial manner for another 15 years, Athena takes on a more
controversial air.

\subsection{Seeds of conflict}

Since the key driver of this conflict appears to be the decision to
embark on such an ambitious program of development, one is led to
question the motivations for such high goals.  Computer innovation in
education could have been accomplished by granting every student a
MacIntosh at a fraction of the total cost of Athena.  This would have
eliminated most of the hardware and software difficulties, allowing
all of MIT's resources to be concentrated on developing courseware.
This approach has been taken by many other universities and it
certainly constitutes and acceptable educational innovation using
computers. Of course, this would entail substantial limitations on
future system capabilities.

Why did MIT choose pursue their dream
of fully-networked 3M workstations?  There are a number of factors
which played a prominent role:

\begin{itemize}

\item The MIT Mentality: Project Athena gives the following words
of advice to the frustrated Athena user:

\begin{quotation}

``Athena will probably change your educational experience at MIT.
Occasionally, you may experience some of the frustration that always
is associated with being on the leading edge of a new technology.  At
times, the changes seem to occur far too slowly; at other times, they
happen too quickly.  Just remember that part of the reason you came to
MIT was to be part of the excitement associated with the forefront of
technology and science.''\cite{athena-qa}

\end{quotation}

MIT views itself as a visionary institution.  It does things first, it
does them best. The personal computer approach has already been taken
by many less prestigious universities. For MIT to embark on any
program other than the most ambitious one possible would be shirking
``smart man's burden.''


\item Funding Considerations: In addition to opening up a new
educational market for the major vendors, Project Athena is doing a
good deal of the initial development of software that the major
companies would have to do at their own expense otherwise.  3M
technology is a newcomer, untried and untested.  No corporate
purchasing agent is going to invest a large amount of money in
networked workstations until most of the bugs have been worked out.
Thus, MIT is making a positive contribution to the value of a new
product.  No such benfits would be gained if this project were done
with already proven personal computers like the IBM PC-AT.

\item Origins of Athena and the MIT Balance of Power: The initial
interest in Project Athena came from the Electrical Engineering and
Computer Science Department.  Having taken the initiative, it was the
senior faculty in this department that sculpted the final deal.  Four
of the main actors (Joel Moses--Head of the Electrical Engineering and
Computer Science Department, Michael Dertouzos--Director of the
Laboratory for Computer Science, Gerald Wilson--Dean of the School of
Engineering, and Paul Gray--President of MIT) are currently or have
been professors in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Department at MIT.  Further, the EECS Department at MIT is by far the
largest, with fully one third of the undergraduates majors.  Thus, it
is only natural that Project Athena settled on such sophisticated
machinery.  One wonders how the project would have been shaped had it
been under the guidance of the Department of Humanities.

\item Differing interpertations of ``innovation:'' 

In much the same way that Athena's hardware deployment have been
represented as innovative use of computer resources, the Project seems
to think that the development of courseware is also an innovation:
``How does Athena foster educational innovation?  Athena sponsors
curriculum development projects.''\cite{athena-qa} By definition, it
is impossible for a development project to be innovative.  A project
may contain innovative processes or methods, but a true educational
innovation would be more properly referred to as an ``implementation
project'' -- it would already have to be developed.

\end{itemize}
	

	Athena's eventual goal envisions an environment allowing the
student to do all of his work, be it word processing, number
crunching, or learning French, on a workstation linked to a
campus-wide net.  They have chosen to pursue this goal by developing
the sophisticated learning software first.  This has caused them to
discourage the use of the network for more commonplace applications
for fear it would impair the development of these teaching modules.
The result of this heavy emphasis on long-range development has been a
very unequal utilization of resources, as well much slower development of
computer competence.



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