Joshua Marks has focused his 20-year-long career on using emerging technologies to enable and improve learning opportunities for all children in both formal and informal settings. As Chief Technology Officer, Joshua oversees all technology development and hosting infrastructure for Curriki.org.
Not many people remember The Manhole or Cosmic Osmo and the Worlds Beyond The Mackerel as they were very early CD-ROM games and the first from Cyan Worlds, who went on to make the blockbuster game Myst. The Manhole actually pre-dated the CD-ROM and was packed with several floppy disks in its first version. I still have a really cool special edition Osmo with a holographic Osmo world on the CD jewel case. What fewer still know is that Myst, like Osmo and The Manhole before it, were created using a nifty program by Bill Atkinson for the original Macintosh computer called HyperCard. HyperCard gave the world, and educators in particular, the promise of the concept of Hypertext and HyperMedia even before the advent of the World Wide Web. HyperCard was like a “gateway drug” for many future game designers and developers, and an early example of the promise of making tools for average people to create interactive media and hypertext-based content.
HyperCard, when released in 1987, was quickly adopted by educators because its graphical drag-and-drop and intuitive “Index Card” metaphor-based user interface enabled them to easily make simple quizzes and interactive lessons that allowed kids to explore concepts in a more engaging, multi-sensory and self-directed way. Much like the Public Domain shareware libraries of Basic programs I talked about in my last post, HyperCard once again enabled a group of innovative people, now without an interest in learning a programming language, to create and share interactive learning resources. These shared HyperCard games and activities become known as “Stackware.”
Some of these Stackware programs were enhanced and commercially published. Perhaps the best ever, besides Osmo and Myst, was the Voyager iterative exploration of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (which you can’t find anywhere but would make a killer interactive DVD with its detailed movement-by-movement analysis of that amazing work. Here’s a demo.). Sadly, HyperCard was officially discontinued in 2004 after years of neglect and now most of that creativity has been lost to history. But the lesson remains that if you provide innovative teachers a tool that is easy enough to use and understand, they will create really useful stuff and share it. That is what we are trying to do at Curriki, and in a way that will never be able to be discontinued.
As we continue to evolve Curriki, we seek to enable and inspire creativity and sharing. We, like HyperCard, are thinking beyond the “book” metaphor and into the world of hyper-connected hyper-media. What is new about Curriki is the collaborative way we seek to have end users create, mix, remix and improve the content. It is no longer about an author creating a work for a large or even mass audience; it is about the massed creating and sharing with the masses (or communities of practice with themselves). While Apple first used the “desktop” metaphor, and HyperCard used the “index card” metaphor, Curriki is lacking that single concept, idea or picture that serves as the organizing principle to bring all of the pieces of Curriki together: the communities of practice and peer review, the collaborative editing and remixing, the multitude of content and media types, the interactivity, and the idea of a shared library we can all add to.
Please add your comments on what metaphor you believe best encapsulates the ideas, purpose and experience of Curriki. Is it a “garden,” or a “library” or “rock soup,” or…???
Joshua Marks
Chief Technology Office
www.curriki.org