I recently read an interview with the “punk rock mathematician”, Tom Henderson, and found myself thinking a lot more than I regularly do when reading articles about teachers.

His teaching methods are weird and crazy, but highly enjoyable for those who attend them. Usually, teaching methods described as “cool” and “hip” make me cringe and feel sorry for everybody unlucky enough to attend that lecture.

But to understand how Tom Henderson teaches, he makes three points:

1. Punk rock is founded upon not knowing how to play your instrument
2. He has no idea what the problem with math education in the US is.
3. Math knowledge also exists as a performative concept

First things first. In an argument with his high school girlfriend – who was very much into punk music – he made the claim that punk is founded upon people not knowing how to play their instrument.

Which is true, but not the point. Being in a punk band, and being terrible at playing your instrument, is all about performing on a stage. Instead of pointing fingers at those who can’t play, one should focus on acknowledging the courage they have for getting up there and living the dream.

This changed his worldview completely, and what his teaching style is now founded upon.

When asked what the problem with math education in the US is, he has no idea. But what he knows is that many students’ approach to math is wrong. It’s all about showing the steps, getting an A for answering correctly and knowing the books inside out.

Essentially, it’s about not knowing anything, but still being able to answer the questions posed in the tests. What if math was more about the path towards the solution, and not just handing in an answering sheet? What if math was more like punk?

Math must also be about the performance – just as punk music is. If he has to climb the chair and desk to show the progression of a graph – he climbs and climbs and climbs. The visual element of math becomes real and the ridiculous bunch of letters and graphs becomes an interesting problem that should be solved.

Why do we blog this?

Besides talking about teaching, Tom Henderson actually touches upon a point that’s essential in the fundamentals of 23. It’s always been about building tools for people who want to express themselves, without the need to learn to operate the instruments usually needed to do so.

It shouldn’t be a hassle to set up a website that you can upload pictures to – it should be accessible to everyone looking for a way to show off what they stumble upon every day. That’s where 23 Photo Sharing comes in.

If we take it even further, we find the purpose behind making 23 video. Five years ago, a couple of guys started something called YouTube (you might have heard of it) that kicked off a video revolution. Every minute, 20 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube. Every single minute. It’s an unbelievable resource of education material, music, humor and cultural artifacts.

Yet, if you were an organisation looking for a possibility to have your own site, own domain and own relation to users you’d pay a premium price. It’s not unheard of that you pay €30,000 just to get started, and you never really knew the end price if you want extra modules and features.

We figured that if you take the best of both worlds – the ease of publishing a video to YouTube with the options of customisation from the premium retailers – interesting stuff could happen.

Now we’re seeing all kinds of creative uses for video; campaign sites, intranets built around video, video archives in municipalities being activated, kids talking about their schools etc.

It doesn’t take you months and months of preparation to start a video site, and it certainly won’t cost you tens of thousands of Euros.

To us, it’s all about taking the punk approach to video – it doesn’t matter if all you have is a Flip or Kodak Zi8 or whatever. What matters is that you have something to say and start performing!

We’ve been on a road trip again and as last time, we were so busy we couldn’t write anything. Luckily, the iPhone camera is actually halfway decent if you process the images through Camerabag.

So here goes – a walkthrough of sightings from London and Hamburg:

At The Hospital Club:

Crazy elevator:

It rained a lot. But then again, what did we expect – it’s London:

And then, the day after, the sun appeared:

All of a sudden, we were featured on a Pink Floyd record sleeve:

In Hamburg, Thomas tried to convince the employees at Scholz & Friends that Danes don’t lie:

Café Paris in Hamburg had a crazy ceiling:

Rosi’s Bar had crazy stickers:

Heading to the airport while the sun rose over the city:

Approaching CPH is always nice, but particularly nice is the flight over Øresundsbron:

Yes, the inevitable iPad post has hit the 23 blog.

Obviously we’re very excited about the iPad – not only because Apple introduced a new product (we are dedicated, naïve fanboys here at the office), but because the shape of the device itself is interesting for us. After it was introduced, our internal “digital watercooler” – Yammer – was red hot with posts from 23-employees discussing which version of the iPad would be the best purchase. Not if we should buy it, but which one.

The “tagline” of 23 is “The Visual Sharing Company”. We like things that are communicated visually and our products reflect that. We already have tight integration between 23 Video and other platforms such as podcasting through iTunes and RSS, directory listing in Boxee and an iPhone/Android-optimized site (try accessing http://video.reboot.dk on your iPhone/Android). The integration with other platforms is essential for sharing video with customers who want to access the content in their own way.

With the introduction of the iPad on Wednesday, we saw a new potential for our customers to reach out and create compelling experiences for their customers. After all, video already looks good on the iPhone, but it will look absolute stunning on the iPad with a screen size four times larger than the iPhone.

So tell us, what are some of the things you look forward to seeing the most on the iPad?

Last week, part of the 23 team were in Amsterdam to touch base on the local scene and get to know a bit more about the lovely Dutch people’s opinion on video. It was a nice trip that took us all around the city, and we got to meet up with people from the web business as well as government and public service. Hopefully we’ll soon be able to show you some more tangible outcome from the trip, but until then, here’s a selection of some of the pictures we took in Amsterdam:

All the pictures are taken with an iPhone and edited using the Camerabag application on the iPhone. It’s by far the easiest way of producing images that are of far higher quality than you (well, I, for one) can usually create. If you want to see more, the whole gallery from our trip is here: 23 in Amsterdam

In the coming months, we will be in a bunch of other European cities, so feel free to get in touch if you want to hear more about 23 Video or just say hi.