I had a great discussion with Maik Arnold about digital gardens and one of the things we discussed was the usage of them in educational context to which I proposed two interesting options. These are early ideas that I’m hoping to further experiment with.

Related topics: Learning in public

Teacher’s Digital Garden

Teachers (with a wide definition including all sorts of educators) accumulate a lot of knowledge in their field over time and it would be great to see publicly shared digital gardens by educators. This could be beneficial in many ways:

Many teachers create their own teaching materials and maybe write articles and books about their expertise and cultivating a digital garden can be highly beneficial in that process. These digital gardens can then also function as additional materials for students to dive deeper into topics that don’t have enough space in the main material.

In addition, especially in university context, these digital gardens could inspire students to find research topics from the outskirts of the garden. These can be topics that are adjacent to the professor’s / researcher’s own work but not in the main focus, providing potential synergies and starting points.

Students’ Digital Garden

I remember seeing back in the day a post somewhere online where a teacher shared how their students had started doing collaborative notes in Google Docs or similar.

What if, at the start of a course (or even at the start of larger study programs), the students would start their shared collaborative digital garden to work on together to help everyone learn better. As learners, we learn things at different pace and pick up different things faster or slower than others. Building a shared notes system where everyone contributes to can be highly effective.

When I was studying at university, we often got together to work on demos/labs, helping each other get through exercises and exams. It worked really well but there’s nothing really left of them and everything was very ad-hoc. By documenting all that collective knowledge and understanding into a shared system could make all of that even better.