There is a terrific article by Marc Prensky in the March issue of Edutopia titled “Programming: The New Literacy”. Marc makes the case that literacy will soon be defined not just by reading and writing skills, but also by programming skills.

He reminds us of a level of programming everyone is already doing with our phones and remote controls. What’s most interesting is that he expects everyone to graduate from this type of menu-driven programming to a point where many of us will be using scripting languages, Flash, and/or piecing together open source software to meet a specific need.

“As the highly literate adult of today might pen a witty birthday card note for a young niece or nephew, the highly literate adult of tomorrow might program the child a game. And though today’s highly literate person may enjoy a sophisticated novel or nonfiction book on a plane or train ride, tomorrow’s highly literate person may prefer to change, by programming, whatever story or other media he or she is interacting with to suit individual preferences, and might then, with a little more programming, distribute those changes to the world.”

Marc isn’t alone. The Python community has rallied around Guido van Rossum’s beliefs that everyone should learn to program.

We share Marc’s vision in terms of the end goal. But I think we differ in how we’re going to get there. Rather than educating everyone on programming, we believe the best way to get to this form of literacy is fix the tools. If tools are available to create and distribute software without the need to program, then creativity can be harnessed more effectively. Surround that with a community capable of sharing ideas and software components, and now creativity can actually be accelerated.

Do you share Marc’s vision for literacy?

We have been rolling out new features and stability improvements nearly every week. We are especially excited about last week’s release because we have incorporated additional viral channels within Facebook.

Users can now challenge their friends to a game contest from within Sharendipity using Facebook notifications. This provides an exciting new level of social engagement for game-related applications currently published on the platform.

Furthermore, from a creators perspective, they now get this tight social integration for free with every Sharendipity application they create and deploy on our platform. No programming is required on their behalf to take advantage of this powerful element of Facebook. Simply add the high score action to your game, and the friend challenge framework will appear on your asset page. Very fun stuff!

More is on the way! Come check out some of the creations that have been published thus far, and challenge a friend today!

Inching closer to being totally open… In the fall, we made the decision to transition our initial launch to the Facebook platform. The primary driver for this move was the attractiveness of quickly and cheaply acquiring users. We’re introducing a new way of creating software so any help we can get in recruiting is a plus. We also felt that our vision lines up perfectly with the Facebook audience as they look for new ways to express themselves online and with their friends.

We immediately ported our alpha release to the Facebook platform and began leveraging the viral channels available to spread user activity within Sharendipity. At the same time, we continued to introduce new creation tools, improve stability, and fold user feedback into the client. The next step was to loosen the grip a bit to encourage more adoption of our platform, and provide a real audience for our content creators.

In that spirit… we’ve made some changes to our accessibility on Facebook. As of a few weeks ago, anyone can install Sharendipity and run the applications created by our users (although we’ve still limited access to the creation tools for the time being).

Hopefully this will provide a little more incentive to our early adopters to create new content. We also wanted to start spreading the word on our platform. So if you haven’t done so already, please install Sharendipity and play some of the applications created thus far. There is a mixture of games and slide shows that integrate your Facebook friends. More applications are being added all the time…