Pedagogy-focused edtech: small, local, and private.

The Strange Tool Store is a co-operative who craft and curate strange tools.

What's strange about them? Well, we don't subscribe to the conventions of modern surveillance software and blackbox processes, software that doesn't respect you as the tool owner and tool user. Or as Cory Doctorow (2023) would have put it the "en💩tification" of software.

Strange tools put you back in charge of the bicycle for the mind (Jobs, 1990)

So what exactly is the The Strange Tool Store? Well The Strange Tool Store is a co-operative seeking to further discuss, discover, design and create brand-new education technology, we believe that digital technologies have great capabilities to actually enhance learning but the way they are currently designed gets in the way.

We believe a new approach is needed and that is by designing and creating small, private, decentralised, local-first specific technologies to actually work within learning environments that don't spy on you, where there is no black box and are made with very specific purposes to supporting curiosity, creativity and discovery, focusing on increasing collaboration, co-operation and communities of practice.

When using the affordances of a notebook and pen, reading a book, visiting a museum, our thoughts and ideas are private or shared with those that you decide, yet the vast majority of our digital technologies specifically in schools, colleges and universities now monitor, read, ingest and consumes our time learning, our thoughts and ideas without our control.

If we want to use technologies to wonder, ponder, learn and grow working together we need tools that do not spy on us.

The Strange Tool Store is looking to become the place to support, create and showcase such tools. https://strangetool.store/ nodenogg.in

We started this journey building nodenogg.in (see repo below) a tool that increases participation and confidence in crits and feedback sessions within University Art Schools this was funded by myself and a few UKRI small funds to get to 1.0 summer 2025, after almost a decade of research, and we have some exciting things free of course set for https://nodenogg.in in 2026 find out more at https://docs.nodenogg.in. Our donation/supporter goal for The Strange Tool Store

So we are now looking to build this co-operative in a sustainable way, so we are asking friends, those interested in this concept, tech builders and designers to support our goal to reach £400 of donations per month. This will be used to fund meet ups, technology, experiments and time to develop these concepts further. Not a beer or caffeine fund!

Please note this is not to fund or support the larger ambitions of the projects and we will still continue to seek research and commercial funding inline with the principles developed from Dr. Adam Procter's research that education technology should be free/libre software, local-first, private, simple exportable data and modular code.

We want to be as transparent as possible to ensure you see what the money is used for and so if you can donate £5 a month that would be amazing. I will be donating £10 a month personally to this fund as well.

We will also post specific project updates at https://blog.strangetool.store/ and you can follow @adamprocter on mastodon, bluesky or his blog at https://discursive.adamprocter.co.uk, you can also join the discussions at https://discuss.strangetool.store and we have a specific discord for nodenogg.in development too. https://discord.gg/bpJPZxWs

So if this sounds exciting or at the least intriguing, please consider setting up a recurring payment. Or just a one off donation to show support would be much appreciated.