Volunteers

Volunteers.  We need 'em.  Are you one of 'em?
We're busy putting together Thumbprint course materials covering Math, English, History - you name it.  But we're barely scratching the surface.  There's so much out there, so many great ways to learn important things.  If you've got a course, a lesson or a tidbit you'd like to share with the world (or you know a teacher who does) we'd love to hear from you.  We're working hard to build a big, fun, flexible library of content, and working harder to keep it free.  We need your help.

If you're interested, drop us a line at info@thumbprinteducation.org

Dragons

"Have you seen this?"  I get asked that a lot.  Almost daily.  Recently it always relates to educational software. Big surprise.  In three years this segment has exploded. There may be ten thousand companies working I the space, up from next to nothing in the span of a Presidential term.  So there's no shortage of things to see, and each new company is a potential competitor, rival, or scary monster that might do what Thumbprint does only better, faster, bigger.  With sprinkles.

Except they never do. There's some overlap, sure, as well as companies with hundreds of times our resources, million-dollar marketing pushes, backing from this foundation or that.  But there's always something missing, as well. Something that nobody wants to take on:  Crowdsourcing.

If you want off-the-shelf content, you can have it.  If you want a blank canvas on which to create something from scratch, you can have that too.  But if you want to create a virtuous cycle where everyone creates a little and borrows a lot, you've got...us, apparently.

Now there are several technical reasons why such features are scary.  We spent months of design trying to prevent things like data corruption and infinite loops (you know, bad stuff).  But I don't think that's why.  I think there's still a fundamental mistrust of crowdsourcing, maybe unconscious, buried deep. I think we still look at Wikipedia and see not comprehensive proof that a theory is true, but some sort of random, magical event with no broader application.  I think that, once again, technology is outpacing human nature.  Which is exciting.

I Cannot Think of Anything to Write

Anyone else ever get this instruction from a teacher?  For English class, or journalism, or whatever?  I got it all the time.  I used it all the time. Is it still allowed? If anyone knows, please leave a comment.

Anyway, I now sit down to write yet another editorial, coming straight from yet another teacher meeting, so I have two reasons to invoke this ghost.  Some days, you have a great idea, and writing is easy. Most days you don't, and if given the chance to borrow rather than create, you'd do it in a heartbeat.  But not always.

Most educational tools assume that one of these - build or borrow - is the way things should always be, and give no thought to the other.  Software either focuses on content or tools, almost never both.  Reality is messy, though. Sometimes someone else's stuff is exactly what you need - you're uninspired or busy or behind schedule. Other times, you have the perfect lesson and want to build it from scratch yourself. Most often, you fall somewhere in between - you want to use someone Else's work as a starting point and then add your own personal touch.

That's why we built Thumbprint the way we did, making it easy to create, share and modify stuff. Whether your feeling creative or overwhelmed, the tools are there to get you where you need to go. If only there was an equivalent tool for blog writers...

Cornerstones

Last week I stated flatly that technology is the cornerstone of a meaningful education.  And then, having dropped the grenade, I moved on to other things.  If I'm serious, that's a pretty contentious statement.  Part of a meaningful education, fine, but the cornerstone?  Come on.  Less hyperbole, right?

Except I mean it.  So let's back up to around the steam engine.  The killer app, the big thing in information dispersal, is the printed book.  Suddenly we can produce unlimited quantities of identical books and give them to anyone who wants them. Suddenly we can create a link, at one remove, between a modern child and a thinker who's been dead for two thousand years. Suddenly, for the first time ever, an obscure person on some corner of the map can write a phrase that becomes part of the cultural zeitgeist, not in ten generations, but within his or her lifetime.  All that's needed to achieve this dream is some existing hardware - brains and eyes - and some simple software - literacy.

There's one problem, though - not everyone can read.  It varies by place and culture, but in most parts of the world literacy is a luxury. It's something you do if your parents are rich, or you have a career that requires it.  Most people are still farmers - do we really want to spend tons of time and government money teaching farmers to read?  Why not spend public money where it's needed?  Better yet, why spend it at all?  Cut taxes.  If individual families value literacy, they can pay the expense and give it to their children.

Take a minute and realize how few words I need to substitute in the above paragraph to make it describe the present day.

Why do I think technology is the cornerstone of a meaningful education? Because it already is.  It always has been.  The only thing that changes is the specific technology we're talking about.  And since the book, we haven't had much of a discussion about new technologies being integral to the teaching process.  Computer labs are optional, limited, and generally not irreplaceable in the curriculum.

The difference between technology literacy today and print literacy 200 years ago is, essentially, nothing.  In both cases we're talking about the new de facto medium of exchange, and whether we want our children to be part of the future or not.  Scratch that - we're talking about whether we want them to have any say in how the present works or not.

Socrates was deliberately illiterate.  He said that if we knew how to read, we could just look up what others had written and would lose the ability to think for ourselves.  He thought that literacy was a terrible technology that would lead to moral and intellectual decay.  A brilliant, respected man, saying maybe the most incorrect thing ever said.  I think we should all reflect on that.