I never enjoyed learning at school and college. After I got frustrated with my learning experience at college, I dropped out and started exploring my curiosities from the open resources on the web.

An ongoing thread on how to reinvent online learning through ‘Curation Network’ -

Here’s why I’m building @SvearchHQ -

The web has lots of valuable open resources ready to be discovered by all kinds of curiosities. But it is becoming more and more challenging to make sense of how to discover and learn new topics fast.

That's because the tools we use to search on the web help us only in finding facts and information. Newsification does not serve the process of learning. Because something flows on the top, it does not make it relevant or better.

While there are various bookmarking and knowledge management tools available to filter and collect resources, they do not help much in curation. They do not guide us to a contextual and serendipitous learning journey.

We need something that's more like a map than a search or an encyclopedia. A map for learning which helps us explore the origin, journey and the destinations.

In a classroom environment, a syllabus plays the role of a learning map. It guides us on what to read, in what order and how it's all interconnected. It even makes us realize the broader purpose of why to learn a specific topic.

The opportunity lies in reinventing the syllabus.

Here’s how it can work -

Most people source, filter and collect different online resources categorically to revisit it later for learning and research. The essential ingredient is a link which helps to facilitate this process.

While there are lots of tools available which help in aggregating the links efficiently, most of them do not help in capturing or aggregating what's inside the links. Nuanced content aggregation is needed to filter the signals from the noise.

There's no need to aggregate the totality of content to capture the crux of it.

A browser plugin can help easily capture various snippets of content categorically can help us filter out the signal from noise; 2 paragraphs of an article, 5 minutes of a YouTube video and 2 minutes of a podcast.

A lot of us misunderstand content curation with content aggregation. Both processes look similar but are not the same.

Content curation is a process which involves creating a map of ideas connected across the space of contexts. It helps in discovering new ideas through the intersection of different things we experience and learn.

Many attempts to curate online content were in the form of lists and collections. But the problem is that they are linear, have no context and have almost no informed personal takes added along with it.

The goal of a curator is to discover and make new connections, contexts and relationships in between the curated content and the person engaging with it.

The aggregated content can be curated by arranging it in a tree-like structure in which each branch can be a separate topic, perspective or a question. And to establish different contexts, a curator can also add their takes as writing, voice note or a video on top of any content.

Multiple curators should be able to collaborate in real-time, and each content block should be reusable allowing anyone to pull or push ideas to create their remix.

Svearch can help passionately curious people create and make sense of their own digital gardens.

Digital gardens are a creative reimagining of personal blogs which explore a wide variety of topics and are frequently adjusted and changed to show growth and learning, particularly among people with niche interests.

This movement is gaining momentum now, but its roots date back to 1998, when Mark Bernstein introduced the idea of the “hypertext garden,” arguing for spaces on the internet that let a person wade into the unknown.

He wrote,

“Gardens and parks lie between farmland and wilderness."

“The garden is a farmland that delights the senses, designed for delight rather than a commodity.”

The whole point of digital gardens is that they can be cultivated, grown and changed.

Mike Caulfield, who has researched misinformation and disinformation, wrote a blog post in 2015 on the “The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral,” in which he writes,

“By engaging in digital gardening, you are constantly finding new connections, more depth and nuance.
...

...What you write about is not a fossilized bit of commentary for a blog post. When you learn more, you add to it. It’s less about shock and rage; it’s more connective.”

While there are lots of resources available on the web for learning new topics, it takes a lot of time to distil the signals from the noise, especially when someone is starting with a new topic.

There are also various forms of synchronous learning made accessible by schools, colleges and organizations, but learning happens better when curiosity guides it, and it is self-paced hence asynchronous.

Various ideas, resources or perspectives on the same topic can coexist in a digital garden which helps learners save time in distilling the signals from the noise.

Map-like non-linear pathways can help learners explore a subject and its topics at their own pace guided by their curiosity.

Svearch must also offer ways to annotate and set reminders or prompts for revisiting topics later on so that the learnings get retained better.

Learning should not be a solitary experience that is why a community which learns together on the same page can improve the learning process.

A learner should be able to highlight snippets of any text, audio or video which creates a new discussion thread, or they can join the existing ones.

Inline discussions can offer immediate doubts resolution and a nuanced and contextual understanding of a complex topic fast.

My mission is to design, build and democratize the tool for networked curation and learning which also incentivizes a closely-knit community of individuals interacting with it.

Key people who have been a huge source of learning - @balajis @andy_matuschak @thedanigrant @Conaw @sariazout @MarieDOLLE @Jad_AE @Mappletons @jordanmoore @azlenelza @_patriciamou @anthilemoon @maxkriegers @AGWilsonn @RobertHaisfield

Feel free to share your ideas, feedback and suggestions.