Welcome to SophWares, a destination that I humbly suggest as, and hope to develop into, a new model for the educational information economy. SophWares is more about a journey for us all as we live, grow, and learn. Especially focused on teaching and learning, SophWares aims to contribute to the educational environment, both through the formal channels of educational institutions K-12, higher education and upward, as well as the private and solo endeavors of the “forever student”. SophWares aims to become a site for collaborative effort that will address fundamental questions of value and a hope for new ideas to help build a foundation for a fair and just marketplace, with secure information exhange, and with reasoned compensation for creative effort.

I am concerned that educational institutes have lost their way as thought leaders and contributors to the advancement of information technology, both within the confines of the educational information infrastructure as well as the explosion of the internet outside of academia and research into the social and commercial IT systems of today. Particularly, we have failed miserably in providing for a secure foundation with which to exchange private information for self-edification and commerce as reflected in the continuous revelation of information breaches. It is my hope to address this issue here by revisiting the foundations of secure communication involving both trustworthy authentication and fine grained access controls.

I am concerned that our educational systems are not reaching the full potential of the promises of the computer-enriched learning environment. I have recently retired from one of the largest universities in the country. I wonder if you, like me, find that educational institutions have stumbled a bit by focusing effort on classroom enrichment through computer as medium rather than the revolution that could be with the computer as simulated reality. We have replaced the age-old professor with lecture behind the lectern and presenting on the white or black board with podcasts of professors with lecture behind the lectern displaying on the white or blackboard and sometimes enhanced with a Powerpoint presentation.

SophWares is committed to simple principals. The first is that the educational experience is revolutionary when the mediated classroom is enhanced with computer simulation. When the student is challenged by the “what if” scenarios driven by personal interaction with a well-developed simulation, then the student moves on from the memory storage device to the companion thinking entity brimming with understanding. I would like to present within this forum some examples of challenging simulations.

Welcome to the power of We.