09/02/2024 11:05 Public
Implementing Education Technology With Nostr Good morning nostr, Thank you for reading my first post on Creatr. I’ve recently implemented nostr badges into my education technology platforms, fulfilling a long-standing belief that edtech experiences can be decentralized meaningfully. So I’ve decided to write and introduce myself in a more long-form manner. Previously, I would prioritize creating education technology content on Patreon & Tiktok but have recently decided to dedicate my strategy to build a bridge to nostr by using my background in computer science and human-computer interaction. I’m pretty enthralled by nostr as a technology and believe it affords wonderful experiences online, so I’m happy to dogfood along with other great engineers, designers and professional cypherpunks. I’m also spiritually content to find a tribe of people that I can express my thoughts freely to, in the sense that folks understand what I mean when I talk about the things I’m passionate for. It is often the case that I encounter a lack of imagination from others while aspiring to build the future in the right direction. People get used to the ways of the old and struggle to accept that things can be different or better. As you can see with my public persona, education technology fascinates me and I long believed that it ought to be constructed in a way that makes education finance more equitable and fair. Education, to me, is somewhat of a sacred subject that provides wonder, security and love for life, so I’m eager to build education technology in ways that achieve that outcome. This is why I summarize my work in three concepts: 1. Every student should have access to many good teachers. 2. Online education should be the best education. 3. Learning creates scholarships. For the longest time, it wasn’t very clear how to achieve these things in a fruitful way but I did at least have the foresight to understand it would require enough humility to think thoroughly about rather than excitedly seeking capital and social validation for my ideas. I learned pretty early that the education sector moves awfully slow and the name of the game was to do things right instead of doing things quickly. It’s a tricky game because a child’s mind changes, grows and adapts every day, so a lack of patience and overconfidence in one’s ability are not good qualities to nurture in the education sector, which is somewhat the opposite of the Silicon Valley ethos to move fast and break things. Another thing that I was fortunate enough to understand early was that education technology probably didn’t serve a transformative role in the classroom as much as Silicon Valley believed it did. The process of teaching and learning is deeply complex and the constraints of computing would never move the needle in ways that had been hoped. There was no revolutionized classroom, there was no more humanized affordances - in fact one could argue that the opposite happened and the quality of classrooms had begun to degrade with technology. The same problem remained as it always did, education moved slowly and thus education technology could not keep up with the ferocity of other mediums. People preferred to spend their time learning and growing on social media or online video games. In my view, the ultimate goal for most teachers is to discover, unlock and amplify the self-esteem of a student so that they can be self-reliant, hopeful and imaginative enough to overcome the natural challenges that life offers when forming the unpredictable future for themselves or for others. Unintuitively, social media creators had a more pragmatic approach for educational outcomes than education technology constructions. Technologists were not well-versed in the nature of education and had constructed solutions from the perspective of a technologist, which largely focused on access to opportunity rather than securing opportunity. Regardless, education did change but human’s uncanny ability to adapt quickly had adjusted almost immediately to these new mediums and distributions. It took me some time to realize those three concepts and it took even longer to begin to actualize them. So for a while, I prototyped these concepts with names like LearnUI, MathUI and eventually landed on what became Robots Building Education in 2019. The name Robots Building Education was mostly inspired by the fact that I worked in factories and I believed that Bitcoin had a place in education technology with the proliferation of robotics, AI or other advanced computers. I don’t believe it requires too much imagination that Proof-of-Work machines, heavy machinery and the nature of a educating minds share a lot of similarities. The combination of words could also be acronymized to a Hispanic identity RO.B.E, short for Roberto. I quickly found that, much like my name, people struggled to pronounce RO.B.E and I was pretty happy with that familiarity. It was very much me and an expression of my experiences and beliefs. It was human. So here we are today, with a more firm understanding why certain technologies like LLMs, Bitcoin and nostr have an appropriate place in education technology. I believe one of the reasons I find myself sharing space here is because of my commitment to honesty and humility that had lead me to a collective of folks who are simply dedicated to the idea that the internet can and ought to be built correctly, so that technology can serve its greater purpose in the bigger picture. In my view, nostr isn’t some ragtag software but a genuine accomplishment to significantly improve the quality of user experiences. This isn't technology meant to serve advertisers, investors and corporations; it's technology meant to serve people. I say this because the protocols being developed on and encouraged with nostr just works! Ironically it isn’t very cryptic for common internet users that seek high quality services because it just works. You’re able to create user experiences instantly or you can onboard people with something as easy as a personal username, creating the possibility to build bridges away from the ways of old and onto the ways of how it should have always been. The Cashu protocol itself allows people to engage in the monetization of authentic user experiences with Bitcoin using already familiar user-oriented technologies like Cash App in one simple step. It’s in spaces like these that allow me to construct and actualize better ideals for education technology. We can create scholarships with learning and connect schools financially in order to undo the damage done by red lines and property values, we can decentralize transcripts to better represent the total effort performed by students and learners and we can achieve the three ideals that drive the creation and development of Robots Building Education. Thank you for reading & God bless! =)
