1 A Little History of e-Learning Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, University of Illinois Abstract This is the story of a handful of researchers and thinkers at the University of Illinois who created the world’s first e-learning system, PLATO. It’s a little story, because it was just a few workers of the mind who came up with some ingenious ideas. Eventually these ideas could be named as networked computing, the visual user-interface, and instant messaging. Some of the foundational aspects of our twenty-first century world of digitally-mediated meaning were invented by the small group of researchers connected with the PLATO project. These ideas were not conjured up by engineers imagining life half a century ahead into the social and technological future. They were tackling something much more practical: to build a “teaching machine.” Over a thirty-year period, starting in 1959 they built PLATO I, then PLATO II, III and IV. Their portentous innovations were not in the first instance technical; they were educational. Educational requirements drove the project and the technology followed. Along the way, the relationships between the professional educators and the professional engineers became at times testy. But after a time the PLATO project did manage to draw in educators from the College of Education, who developed innovative approaches to the application of networked computing to education. These are the foundations of today’s notion of “e-learning.” The little story became a big story, both in education and our wider world of social meaning. This article is an attempt to recover this now largely forgotten little story of the origins of e-learning, and more. John von Neumann Crosses the Prairies It is not too fanciful, perhaps, to think of Urbana and Champaign as a pair of university towns floating in the middle of the great prairies of the American mid-west. Between these two towns is a third, colloquially known as Campus Town, and in the middle of this middle, is to be found the Coordinated Science Lab of the University of Illinois. The location seems inauspicious at first, the historical accident of placing the University of Illinois, a Land Grant University, in the middle of the state. Established during Abraham Lincoln’s presidency under the Morrill Act of 1862, this time seemed inauspicious, too. The Civil War had just begun. Urbana had been on President Lincoln’s circuit, and he had represented the Illinois Central Railroad as it built its line through Champaign. This method of public financing for railroad development is where the Land Grant idea had come from. “Coordinated Science” proved to be more auspicious than the location. But before we get to the coordination part—the alliance of engineers with technologists that led to PLATO—this small spot on the prairies needs to connected with what President Dwight D. Eisenhower called in his 1961 farewell address to the nation, “the military-industrial complex.”