Vannevar Bush's Vision

In 1945 Vannevar Bush, an inventor and engineer, coined term 'trails' in his seminal essay entitled 'As We May Think'. Mr. Bush conceived of a product he called the Memex, which would enable a user to create a trail of linked and annotated pages. The idea was to annotate pages while you research a topic. Each note would be linked to the next note in the trail. Trails would be used to share your knowledge, the result of your research and with a dash of your insight.

I co-founded a company by the name of Trailfire with this same goal in mind. Vannevar Bush was unable to realize this vision. He, of course, lived in a time before the internet. It was simply impractical, in a world of paper documents and microfilm, to make his vision into a reality. Fast forward 60 years and his idea is not only possible, it exists. You can experience it at Trailfire.com.

At Trailfire we asked ourselves these simple questions. How could we enable people to share their knowledge and ideas on the web? How could people help each other discover information? We built this product with broad application, one that could be used by the average web user.

It did not take us long, however, to discover that Trailfire will work well in the classroom. Teachers are using Trailfire to guide their students to web pages that contain information relevant to their course work. Students can ask questions along the trails or even add their own comments. In sense, Trailfire takes the notion of collaborative learning out onto the web and places it context on any web page.

I'm excited about the possibilities of using Trailfire in the classroom. I welcome you all to try out this free service and tell us how we can make a better tool for education.