prabhus

Suggest people take a look at CoLearnr (http://www.colearnr.com), a project I have been working on for the last 15 months. I'm linking a mindmap to a pinboard. The pinboard supports all kinds of media, links, discussions and annotations. Don't want to hijack this thread anymore, but will be happy to have a chat prabhu at colearnr dot com

You can do quite a bit already with CoLearnr.

1. You can create a private topic just for you and curate contents that you like. Very shortly you will be able to share this with your friends and collaboratively build a topic. Check out this video for an example - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HydOgRqByRg

2. We have a small but growing community already. Please check out our topics. Below are some of the topics we are proud of.

http://www.colearnr.com/soft-skills http://www.colearnr.com/topic/522677f41fe5e070f6829e03/moocs

Hi Evegeny,

They are the usual suspects for social learning, aren't they? Pinterest definitely is an inspiration for the user interface.

The problem with typical social learning platforms is the quality. Try learning about a topic from these sites. There will be just no structuring, anyone can share whatever they know, you can have any content on any board - the reality is that these platforms are no better than following lots and lots of twitter feeds and blogs and trying to learn about a topic. There will be lots and lots of links to read and you might end up spending hours and hours reading them. But after spending that much time, have you ever felt that you have just wasted significant part of your life? I always used to feel so. This is the sad state of informal learning which is one of the reason we keep looking for institutions providing formal learning. Among other things, when you pursue a course from a university or a MOOC or something authoritative, there is a trust that you are not going to end up wasting your time reading biased or some amateurish blog about your subject.

One of the things we did with CoLearnr is to attract people with expertise in certain subject areas and allowed only these folks to curate content. Of course, the community plays an important role in enhancing the topic by participating in discussion, suggesting alternative links etc.

We believe that collaborative learning (where learners and experts share/discuss/learn together) is better than a MOOC or pinterest model for life-long learning. I gave a talk to Penn State University on this topic recently - http://coil.psu.edu/2013/09/04/recording-available-redefinin...

Please feel free to shoot any questions/ideas/suggestions to help us build a great platform for learning!

- Prabhu, Miguel, Rashmi and Veronica

I have been working on a startup idea for exactly this purpose. Something that is much better than posting bunch of links on various places, bookmarks and emails. Announcing CoLearnr - A platform where topics can be socially curated, discussed and collaboratively learnt. Very happy to share the dev site since have not launched the main site yet.

http://dev.colearnr.com/finance

I researched MOOCs as part of my thesis and found that the platform they use and their business model is not so great! Is online learning as simple as watching video heads with a bulk standard discussion forum? Very happy to share some of my findings from the research.

- Online learning platform should be built for learners and not IT administrators. This is where moodles, blackboards all suck! - Online learning should be engaging and distraction-free. We can learn a bit from social networks, how they show all the content inline and make it engaging and addictive. - Online learning should make it easy to link knowledge and build conceptual maps. For example, based on the topic you learnt, the platform should show the other topics that you could learn so that you can generalise (broad knowledge) or specialise. - Online learning should suit modern time-constrained learners. For example, typically all these platforms offer just one way of visualising a topic which was originally decided by the curator or the IT administrator. But learners need various views. Won't disclose a lot on this, but for example, a view showing only recently added materials, a view showing only the items to read etc could be intriguing.

Please feel free to take a look at my effort and let me know your thoughts.

tl;dr CoLearnr - a platform for collaborative learning