Posted with the permission of Ted Nelson, who wrote:

Theodor Holm Nelson will be teaching a possibly final, or ‘bucket’, course on all his computer work and ideas.  The title is “CINEMA OF THE MIND: Philosophy and Art of Designing Interaction” (Computer Science 194, U.C. Santa Cruz, winter quarter 2013).  ☛ Further course details will be found at the end of this note.

Dr. Nelson is an independent designer and thinker who for fifty years– since before others imagined personal computing or screen-to-screen publishing– has had deep designs for a computer world very different from that we now face.  While Microsoft, Apple and the Web veered backward, imitating the past and paper, Nelson always designed for the screens-only world we are at last approaching.

Nelson’s Xanadu document designs, well known if not well understood, are generally recognized as precursors to the World Wide Web.  His broader alternative software designs, and their radical theoretical underpinnings, are not well known.  This course boosts their survival and the chance some may eventually prevail.

While other software depicts time as conventional clocks and calendars, Nelson shows it as a spiral that can be tightened to nanoseconds or opened to the lifetime of the universe, wherein you can reconcile people’s schedules for next week or annotate historical theories. While others’ bookkeeping systems show only money, Nelson’s applies to all exchanges– money, Christmas cards, favors, grudges. Instead of today’s isolating “apps” and social cattle pens, he plans a sharable, unifying world of interactive diagrams that zoom to all work and reading, with everything annotatable.

His radical infrastructure includes automatically-coupling data structures, an operating system without hierarchy, and connection-lines between the contents of windows.  These lead to a completely different computer world, and– he fervently hopes– a different human life around them.

All of this is viewed through Nelson’s Schematic Philosophy, offering new terminology and diagrammatics for analyzing complex subjects.

=== COURSE DETAILS

The class is scheduled for Wednesday afternoons from 4 to 7:30, Engineering 2, room 399.  A typical class will consist of a discussion session, a tough lecture, a break, an easy lecture, and another discussion session.

There will be two midterm examinations and a final.  Projects for extra credit (leading to a possible A+) must be negotiated in the first three weeks.

The course is open not just to UCSC undergraduate and graduate students, but to outsiders as well, via a process known as “Concurrent Enrollment.”  Outsider tuition cost appears to be $1355 ($100 application fee for Concurrent Enrollment, plus $1255 tuition).  Two
forms are required: “Concurrent Enrollment Application” to join the university loosely, at http://www.ucsc-extension.edu/sites/default/files/imce/public/pdf/CEAp.pdf  (to be mailed or faxed to the University with the $100– or $65 if
before 14 December) and a form to be signed by the instructor and sent in with tuition payment, at http://www.ucsc-extension.edu/sites/default/files/imce/public/pdf/CEInstrAp.pdf  (final deadline appears to be in mid-January).
More details (not necessarily all consistent) are at: http://www.ucsc-extension.edu/open-campus/enroll

Theodor Holm Nelson PhD
Designer-Generalist, The Internet Archive
Visiting Professor, University of Southampton

My recent books, POSSIPLEX and ‘Geeks Bearing Gifts’, are available from Lulu.com and Amazon.

“Ted Nelson is an idealistic troublemaker who coined the word ‘hypertext’ in the sixties, and continues to fight for a completely different computer world.”