Revisiting PLATO, a Pioneering Learning Technology

Growing up in Urbana, Illinois in the 1980's, I was fortunate that my school district was privy to the PLATO Learning System, created and managed by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. As a child, I was able to access PLATO, an innovative system that pioneered the first online community and e-learning systems. The plasma touchscreen was a true precursor of today's tablet computers, and the system provided messaging and chat rooms before anyone had a computer at home, much less an internet connection.