An Introduction

Before continuing to post as Workshop Maybe, I’d like to introduce myself and to share a bit about why I am starting this project.

My name is James. I live in Massachusetts, on the east coast of the United States. I have been an educator for my entire adult life, first as a high school math teacher, and most recently as a coach and trainer for K-12 teachers. Within the first few years of my teaching career, I discerned my mission of creating learning experiences and classroom spaces where students would leave with more agency and options than they had before. I tried to work in schools where this sort of mission was supported by leadership and the rest of the staff, and when it was not, I worked to make it so. Broadly speaking, this meant minimizing the amount of time I spent standing up and lecturing, while maximizing the time for students to work toward shared, long-term goals, to collaborate, to choose the ways in which they would demonstrate mastery of content. I learned about and implemented systems to make this possible in the classroom, and wrote extensively about my work for an online lesson-sharing platform (for example, the first day of 9th grade algebra was essentially a lesson in decentralization). Five years ago, I left the classroom to work with teachers across the country. My work was focused on student-centered learning, use of new technology to support learning, and culturally-responsive teaching & learning.

For the last few years, I have been supporting K-6 teachers in their use of a program called ST Math. It is groundbreaking software that pushes students to engage deeply in self-directed problem solving and schema-building. If you teach, have young children, or are just generally curious, I encourage you to check it out.

Like Cardano, ST Math is presently rolling out a new version with big improvements for its community. ST Math is built on years of academic research that pushes students to think for themselves, and in many cases pushes teachers to rethink their practice: away from rote memorization, and toward deeper conceptual understanding. Some students, teachers, and parents understand this shift immediately, and some need time and guidance before they recognize the power in such an approach.

For years, I’ve noticed parallels between ST Math and Cardano. Both are great software backed by unrivaled research. Each makes more possible a world that we’re only just beginning to recognize. Both are somewhat unique in the software space: in contrast to apps that pursue simple and intuitive user experiences, ST Math and Cardano both ask a lot of their users. This is not because either piece of software is designed to be challenging. Rather, it is that both tools push us to rethink the ways we are accustomed to doing things. Both projects released the biggest updates in their histories in July, 2020.

I could go on about the connections, so let me know if you ever want to talk. Suffice to say that in order to gain adoption, education and implementation examples are critical in both cases.

So, among the challenges to the adoption of either tool is that both nudge us to rethink what we know about the world, and that having more agency and options comes with new responsibility. It’s true whether we’re talking about a fourth grader learning to think about a solution instead of being told what to do by a teacher, or about an ADA holder learning to secure their private keys rather than relying on a bank to hold their money. It is really cool to see Charles Hoskinson (who has a proven track record as a great teacher via his famous Udemy course and his unrivaled clarity of communication as CEO of IOG) beginning to create a new security series. This sort of first principles thinking — asking, “What do people need to know in order to achieve widespread adoption?” — is among the many strengths of Cardano.

The rewards of taking on responsibility on are great. Some people will reject it at first, they always do, but our mission will be patiently guide new users of Cardano in that direction.

So with all of that in mind, here is an initial overview of my plans for Workshop Maybe.

Our mission is to educate all people in the new possibilities created by Cardano. As Shelley secures the decentralized network, and as Goguen and Voltaire come online for the first time, all of us will have access to tools we’ve never had before. Workshop Maybe will accompany people toward adoption by creating real world use cases for Cardano that will help people learn about these new possibilities. In many cases, these use cases may be fun and somewhat trivial: the idea is that simple, accessible examples will serve as entry points to the ecosystem, all with goal of getting people to the point of having their own ideas for how to use this technology.

Any use case we create will be open source. What we try in one city will be freely available for other people to use as templates in their own. We hope to build a community of contributors who offer feedback on our use cases, who tell the stories of their own implementations, and who share their own ideas.

Along the way, we will advocate for the idea of using open source development beyond software. We have a lot of work ahead, rebuilding in the wake of Covid. We see opportunities for people to use the tools provided by Cardano to take ownership of their communities, to stake their claim to a decentralized world, and to creatively and rigorously define what it means to thrive.

The Cardano community is still small and admirably cohesive. We’re still in the phases of showing the world that Cardano is a more mature project than any that has come before, and that this just might be the project that takes crypto mainstream. But it won’t be like this forever. Already, we are seeing how different groups are contributing to the broad goal of mass adoption.

This sort of “together and separate” approach has been fundamental to the project from the start, as modeled by the collaboration between Input Output, the Cardano Foundation and Emurgo. We’re also seeing it in the example set by our stake pool operators: what an incredibly dedicated, knowledgeable and generous community supporting each other to be the backbone of the platform, and provide outreach to anyone who wants to learn.

Decentralization means all sorts of mini-communities with different expertise working together. If you’re interested in the work of education toward adoption, be in touch. We have an incredible foundation to build upon. Let’s show the world that there’s more to it than they think.