Select images of earth from the Space Station are being been chosen by Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi and tweeted using twitpic to his twitter followers. Immediate, engaging knowledge of science, art, and geography can be enjoyed by anyone dropping by Astro_Soichi where there are today 83,822 followers.
For the handschooling that lies ahead, we can think of an astronaut conducting themed lessons from space, using twitpics of photos taken in real time from the space station as slides to illustrate topics he or she is teaching such as mountains, lakes, urban sprawl — whatever. In fact, what Astronaut Soichi is doing now is wonderful learning content that can do handschooling right now and is probably being engaged by a sprinkle of students here and there. But we know some math on that: there are a million students just in the New York City public schools, and not yet 100,000 followers of the twitpics. Millions of kids around the world are not seeing them, we know for sure.
If you will check out this url — http://twitpic.com/142zn3 — on your mobile browser, you will see that the delivery of the twitpics into your hand is already awesome. What is missing:
1. Letting students use mobiles to browse the internet.
2. Letting lessons emerge outside of the school box.
3. Realizing that the freshest most authoritative knowledge is now in the global online commons.
It may be that the deepest positive of handschooling will prove to be the cooperation and understanding that develops in a young generation that experiences learning from the same page. In the astronaut / twitpic example here, the same lesson and same images could be simultaneously studied by students across the world. We can make this next schooling happen by putting mobiles in the hands of youngsters everywhere.
