There's a now famous tale about Facebook founder and Harvard dropout Mark Zuckerberg creating a group study tool for an art history final. As the story goes Zuckerberg was supposed to be studying for the exam but instead conceived a website and uploaded 500 Augustan images to it with a comment section for each picture he posted. He enabled his classmates to fill in all the comments and share their notes. As a result, the professor claimed that class had the best grades of any final he'd ever given.

In addition to the basics of reading and writing, engaging each other in conversation, community, discovery,.. can help accelerate the learning process. Only a handful of people have discovered Wordzoku. But as we gain users and more and more people post to the site, a network effect can take place where folks are commenting on each other's Wordzoku sentences, ranking the posts on clarity, forming derivative or alternative examples of sentences, and drive each other to learn more about words.

It all starts with participation. Wikipedia was built on this concept. It's an incredible source for gathering and oranizing information. Now I know most Wordzoku users won't be the ones posting to the site. There's a healthy distrust and concerns over privacy amongst the population that keeps some folks from signing up to sites like Twitter, Facebook or any other site on the internet. And I echo those sentiments. You want to be careful about what you post online because you're leaving a digital foot print behind with everything you publish on the internet. Trying to get credit or a new job? As we move forward, more and more people will look beyond your credit reports and resumes and will be Googling you to look at your information on LinkedIn, Flickr and multitude of other platforms. But as a service for education, enabling tools where users can participate with each other will not only increase your own learning but the sharing of knowledge. Posting to a wiki or blog creates a record of knowledge that collectively can build a pretty powerful database which in the case of Worzoku will be examples of how to use sentences. My hope is that because of the social gaming piece being built into Wordzoku people will join for fun. But if by playing it can facilitate students to help each other with writing or communication skills, that's a healthy by-product that's worth investing time in.