For once and for all, Creator leaves behind the world of typographic markup invented by Johannes Gutenberg and his successors in the second half of the fifteenth century. Information architecture must be explicitly designed for a heading or subheading to look different. With Creator’s revolutionary ‘structure’ tool, you can rapidly plan texts, and drag and drop different elements of the text as your ideas evolve.

Creator also ends the ghettoization of different communication modes. You can just as easily add videos, sound, images or any other file as you can type text—all at once, and all together in the same space. Creator is like a blog, a word processor, a video site, an image site and a file upload site. But because it is all of these things, it also something different. It is a genuinely multimodal creation space.

Perhaps the most powerful of all its features are the parallel ‘work’ and ‘about the work’ spaces. These are divided by a curtain which can be pulled backwards and forwards depending on your focus for the moment—the work is on the left, and on the right are the social and feedback dialogues about the work (reviews, annotations and survey … with more tools to come).

For Schools:

Imagine students writing a science report in which they can include a video of the experiment that they have captured on a phone. Imagine students writing collaborative works in which you and they can see who wrote what. Imagine the power of peer learning as students give each other structured feedback using the review, annotations and survey tools. ‘No more pencils, no more books’, children used to say at the end of the school year. In the era of web-enabled devices, this will be the story in a literal sense every day of the year. In fact, it will mean a new era of anytime-anywhere, or ubiquitous, learning. Students will be able to learn just as powerfully when they are not physically sitting in the classroom. The traditional classroom, and traditional learning, will never be the same.

At the Frontiers of Innovation:

Researchers and authors will be able to create in a collaborative web environment everything from short works to works as long and complex as reports and books. They will be able to seek systematic, private feedback. They will be able to include videos, image, sound, datasets and any other file. They will be able to share their finished works with the world in print or electronic formats.