A Clean Slate

This is a portrait from Pompeii of a woman
holding a wax tablet and chewing on her stylus.

Epistemology is the theory of knowledge. One theory in particular is referred to as tabula rasa which means shaven table, or blank slate. The shaven table refers to the method of deleting content from early data storage devices made of wax poured into a wooden frame. These wax tablets would be erased by shaving or scraping the wax off them.

The tabula rasa theory is basically the idea that our minds are blank slates and need to be filled with content through education. John Locke subscribed to this idea and expounded on how to fill the slate in his seminal work Some Thoughts Concerning Education.

John's writing style reminds me
that I don't like the BBC mini-
series Pride and Prejudice.

Okay, so we don't think Tabula Rasa would have been the best name for our product, so we went with Canvas, which is a lot like a wax tablet, in that it's a platform for content, except it's made of cotton. And that's an important point to make - Instructure isn't in the content business. Our platform is open and content agnostic. If you can view it in a web browser, you can add it to a lecture on Canvas without modification.

"Canvas: it's a lot like scraped wax, but better."

Keep learning,