August 26, 1990

I KNOW this is an incendiary statement, but companies applying computer power to solve real problems for real people in the real world are all too rare. They do exist, however, and I found two in the Bay Area alone that are tackling two of society’s biggest problems — language and telecommunications illiteracy.

DynEd International of Portola Valley is using technology to help make people language-literate. Founded in 1988 by Lance Knowles, DynEd now develops and sells what it calls “intelligent interactive courseware” to teach business English to Japanese and European executives. Called “Functioning in Business” and “Interactive Business English,” the products run on a PC clone, a videodisc and a CDROM — at the moment, all running in one box under the hood of a Sony View workstation.

Knowles got the idea for DynEd during a lengthy stint in Japan as an English teacher. He found a useful way to help Japanese students learn real-world English, and knew he could make his method more efficient with existing technology. So he and partner Douglas Crane, director of engineering, built cutting-edge tools that eked out a higher level of performance from videodisc and CDROM technology than it was thought possible.

Today they can ship a complete authoring system, application “tool kit” and a “run-time” version of the system that allows you to “play” a course without having to buy the whole application.

Knowles says he approached Apple Computer and IBM about investing in the company and helping develop the technology, but got the cold shoulder from both. As a result, he went back to his friends in Japan, many of whom had taken his courses, and landed Sony Enterprise Co., Sumitomo Metal Industries and then Longman UK, the world’s largest educational publisher, as equity partners.

What’s exciting about DynEd is not just what it’s doing for foreigners, but what it could do here. The technology is getting cheap enough now that I can imagine a DynEd system, or something similar, in schools, community centers, libraries and corporate human-resource programs to help stem the tide of functional illiteracy. Knowles says it costs about $150,000 to convert an existing course to a different language (Spanish, for example, or Vietnamese). For a larger investment, he can create a whole new course based on his learning paradigm. And he’s very excited about participating in a literacy revolution in this country, if we’ll have him.

“We’re going to be the Microsoft of education,” he says. “If the market comes to us, we’ll build the products.”

Another company that’s doing neat stuff in a different area of literacy is the Electronic University Network in San Francisco. Though presently basking in the high regard of educators, government officials and business leaders for providing some 150 higher education courses online, EUN has bigger — or at least more plentiful — fish to fry.

It wants to make the nation “teleliterate” — that is, give us the skills to jockey a computer and a modem, two of the most important navigational tools of the 21st century — and has nearly finished an online course to do so.

Company principals Sarah Blackmun and Steve Eskow believe that a national effort to increase teleliteracy is necessary in today’s lightning-fast society, to help us operate and/or compete in the dimension of time. As more information becomes available via PC and modem, people who are ignorant of how to use telecommunications will be as out in the cold (though I agree, on a much less elemental level) as those who can’t read.

EUN’s courseware, which is 80 percent complete, consists of a book, “very easy” modem software and five or six sequential learning courses accessible online from EUN. Eskow hopes some enterprising modem manufacturer will see the benefit of pre-setting its modems to be included in such a package, to create a turnkey teleliteracy course for the masses.

What’s really remarkable about EUN’s idea is how little it would cost to get off the ground. Eskow says EUN would need only $75,000 to finish and package the course. The next step would be to train 500 or so “evangelists” — at a cost of about $300 per — who would in turn “start spreading the word at their churches, synagogues and Rotary Clubs.” And talk about making everybody happy — if the teleliteracy project succeeds, not only will we have many more technology-savvy citizens, but yet another entrepreneur will have made it happen.