During the past week or so I’ve been working on finishing a couple of things before their deadlines, and during breaks in working on those I’ve been having fun with Learnist: http://learni.st/. Learnist is sort of like Pinterest but focused more on learning about new things. The idea is that someone who has some knowledge about something designs a “learnboard” about it, and collects things from the web (including PDFs, Google docs and books, Prezi presentations, Kickstarter campaigns, and more), plus their own materials if they like, and puts them together in an order that helps others learn the topic. That person also adds commentary to help explain the artifact posted. There are places to comment on each artifact or on the whole board, and others can suggest new things to be put on the board.
Right now Learnist is in beta, and I am a bit frustrated by the fact that there is nothing on the front page to explain it (though there are learnboards on Learnist itself that give you an overview–you just have to type in “learnist” on the search bar at the top to find them).
You have to send a request to them if you want an account to create your own boards or make comments, but you don’t have to have an account to see all the existing boards. You can see mine by following the links below. They are still in progress, so more will likely be added later (esp. to the first and third ones).
1. What is the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning and How Can I Get Involved?
2. Open Access Journals in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
3. Open Access Scholarly Publishing (and Why It’s Important)
And you could also check out my personal page on Learnist, which lists any new learnboards I may have added since writing this post, as well as the boards I myself “like” and “follow.”
Update Dec. 6, 2012
I received an email from someone over at Grockit, the company that runs Learnist, asking for some suggestions to try to address the problems I noted above with being confused about how it all works when you arrive at the page for the first time. Nice to hear they are concerned and open to suggestions!
They also let me know I could invite others to use Learnist and they could bypass the usual waiting period through that means. So if you want an invite, send me an email (I may have to ask you a couple of questions to make sure you’re a real person and really interested in Learnist, since I’ll personally be inviting you!). Find my email address on my personal website at: https://blogs.ubc.ca/christinahendricks
