At the end of last week, Boulder was hit with our typical March snowstorm. Seems like every year, just as the trees start to bud, a good ol' upslope slammer comes along and buries us in the fluffy stuff for a few more days. As an avid skier and general fan of moisture (which CO sorely needs) I was ecstatic. A Boulder spring storm is always cause for celebration, even though I might advise you to think twice about skiing down Kohler Mesa as I did on Thursday afternoon. ;)

For many folks around town, Thursday's storm was good cause to shut the doors and head home from work for the day.  Personally, the weather gave me pause to ponder again what we're up to here at MindFish. I had several tutoring appointments in Denver Thursday afternoon that I had to cancel after Highway 36 got shut down. Instead of just calling it a wash and leaving my students in weather-driven lurch the week before the ACT test, I fired up some video chat software and did a couple of tutoring sessions on my laptop, a cup of hot coffee by my side as the snow raged on beyond my window. In real time I was experiencing some of the problems and potential solutions that have given rise to MindFish. Distance, scheduling, and weather had ceased to be impediments to the learning process. As I worked, chatted, and laughed with my students, I had a glimpse of what the future might hold.  

The world today has the potential to be a modern day Renaissance. The Rennaissance was a time of rebirth, a time that brought the old classics of western culture back into the light of artistic creation and intellectual scrutiny. Yet it was also a time in which cultures, driven by advances in technology and communication, began to intermingle, create, and innovate in ways the world had never seen before. Gutenberg's printing press allowed for an unprecedented dissemination and preservation of knowledge. Advances in cartography and navigation powered explorations and cultural exchanges. Musical notation was born and disparate cultures began to study and perform the works of their neighbors. Certainly, as even a cursory glance at the history of colonialism will suggest, the Renaissance was not a period of pure sweetness and light. Native cultures were crushed and subjugated by their imperial neighbors, war raged on as always, and the humankind's hubris remained unquenchable. We need look only at a seminal Renaissance artifact - Nicolo Machiavelli's The Prince - to remind ourselves that this vibrant period was marked also by the rise of tyrants and megalomaniacs. Nonetheless, in the sweep of recorded history, the Renaissance period stands alone in the sheer depth and breadth of its cultural creation. In the twilight of the web 2.0 era, we stand at a similar moment in time. The exchange of knowledge and the cultural sharing possible in our world today are truly without precedent. Thanks to modern technology, anyone with an internet connection can learn almost anything he or she chooses to seek out. Someone born in the Phillipines could choose to devote her life to learning the claw hammer banjo and the intricacies of Apalachian mountain music. With a little initiative, she could soon find enough recordings, videos, tutorials, and other resources to build a lifetime of knowledge. Meanwhile, an old banjo picker from Harlan county could spend his evenings and weekends learning to converse in Tagalog. In a perfect technological world, these two people might even meet each other online and decide to share their respective expertise, mutually benefitting and driving their learning journeys forward. The technology at our fingertips makes it all possible.  

Take it easy, you might say...just because you taught a couple of kids about the ACT exam during a snowstorm, you think you're going to recreate the European Renaissance?! It may seem like a whimsical leap of the imagination, but the principles that underlay the greatest period of cultural productivity in western history are the same that guide us in our daily tasks here at MindFish. Building connections and sharing knowledge...these are our core values. Whether it's the practical inaccessibility caused by a spring snowstorm or the geographic distance caused by the accident of birth on different continents, barriers to gaining knowledge will soon evaporate under the focused application of information technology.  Location, money, time, and motivation will cease to be impediments to our learning processes. We will not achieve these goals alone, but at MindFish we are working everyday to stimulate the free flow of knowledge between individuals and to make educational resources available to anyone who wants them. Crafting a dream and building a passion for success are difficult enough. Anyone able to forge these admirable character traits should have the resources he needs made readily available to him. 

At MindFish we are planning to do just that. We are a social learning company dedicated to helping students around the world achieve their dreams of higher education. We hope to soon help students overcome the hurdles before them - geography, time, money, and lack of educational resources - to make these dreams a reality. We are young, driven, and utterly dedicated to this vision. Thanks for reading and please stay tuned.  It promises to be an exciting ride.