Goal Review!

It's Thursday.  We've had four days to get stuff done.  So how did we do?

1. 1000 Facebook likes.  We're at 936 and climbing, so if we continue, we should crack that magic number by the beginning of next week.  Not so long ago, I remember ticking over to 100, so thanks to everyone who's decided to join us.  Welcome.

2. New team member.  Sam is a part of the team, and I couldn't be happier.  In fact, she's the one responsible for making sure the words you're reading made it from my Mail app to the actual internet.  Thanks Sam!

3. Course Content.  Work began in earnest today, after spending time earlier in the week making sure everyone had the materials they needed.  Still planning to reach our first development milestones by the end of 

Friday

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And that's it for now.  Everyone have a happy Halloween.

Space!

 When I was young, Brontosaurus  was a thing, East Germany was a place, Pluto was a planet, and there was exactly one star we were sure had any planets at all - ours.  Now all of that's wrong.  How many globes, atlases, textbooks and encyclopedias are even usable anymore?  It's one of the strongest practical arguments I can think of for migrating to a digital, collaborative version of educational materials.  We learn so much, so fast, and overthrow old ideas so regularly that calling any of this information "fixed" or "finished" just seems ridiculous.  So read the attached article on exoplanets - a term that didn't really exist even 10 years ago.  A whole new field.  What new field will exist 10 years from now?  How many of our current ideas will it overthrow?  I can hardly wait.

October 29th Goals

What are we going to do this week.

1. 1000 Facebook likes.  We're only 105 away. I believe in you.  You can do it.

2. Bring on a new team member. Growing the family is one of the most nerve wracking and satisfying parts of my job. We have someone awesome identified, and I hope that you'll be hearing from her very soon. Watch this space.

3. Implement course materials for our first two client teachers. It's been more than a year since I first sketched our a process for helping teachers get their course materials onto the app, and now we finally get to run it with real, live teachers. 

Stay tuned.  On Thursday I'll let you know how we did.

Imagination

I'm standing in a room.  I see a set of upholstered chairs arranged around a nice, wide coffee table.  Against one wall is a large screen and an Apple TV box.  Smart young folks fill the seats, iPads in hand, talking through a problem.  One of them is projecting their work on to the big screen.  I'm smiling.  This is a good day.

None of it is there, of course.  The chairs or the people or the screen.  I'm standing in an empty room with walls and windows.  But I can see what it can be, superimposed like an hallucination. There are just two problems:

1. I am absolutely terrible at the most of the steps that stand between the dream and reality
2. I need to get this dream into someone else's head, or it'll just stay a dream

And that's the startup, in a nutshell.  You see the idea, but you can't build it by yourself, and you can't hand it to someone like passing a ball.  This can be frustrating.  "It's right there!" you think.  "Can't you see it?"  But they can't.  Because they're normal, well-adjusted people that don't live in your brain.  So you have to talk, and write, and gesticulate, and scramble to find the words.  After awhile people start to question your sanity a little.

Eventually, if you don't give up, the thing takes shape.  The chairs come in, and then the people. And if it works the way you thought it would, pretty soon everyone thinks it's perfectly normal.  Nobody remembers the dream anymore - not even you.  It's just the way the world is now.