New Collaborative Educational Sites

Pinterest is a new social collaboration site that has struck the fancy of many in educator circles.  Pinterest is a site that looks like an online “bulletin board”.  It allows users to “pin” up something you are passionate about and show it off to everyone (instead of a bulletin boards they are called pinboards).  Others in turn can comment on what you pinned up, like it or whatever.  This allows us to share things of interest.  Cool.  Pearson School Systems Blog lists four ways to use Pinterest in Education.  In a nutshell, one shares ideas or lesson plans and gets some collaboration and comments from others, hopefully you get good epistemic conversations where people learning from each other - voila. 

Pinterest for Educators…Learnist

While Pinterest can facilitate learning with epistemic discourse – Learnist is designed for it.  Learnist is designed for anyone to share what they know.  Users can pull together various resources from the web like YouTube videos, images, podcasts, and Wikipedia entries to create a “lesson”.  You can share your “lesson” to your Facebook timeline, make comments, and link your “lesson” to other people or topics.  Users can also recommend lessons to others or just contribute to a lesson that they like or have some expertise in.  

It makes me wonder, what the difference is between Wikipedia and Learnist when it comes to collaborative sites. After all, both allow you to collaborate on the content of a particular topic.  Both allow you to discuss, argue, or whatever about a topic.  However,  I think Learnist makes it easy to create “lessons” by just referencing other material or uploading your own.  Wikipedia requires some knowledge of the scripting language while Learnist is super simple to invoke.  I just think that Learnist seems more inviting.  Plus, you can see the comments right away, like in facebook.  Both Learnist and Pinterest have a "facebook" feel to it.

I love that both Learnist and Pinterest allow users to collaborate on topics of interest.  I love the fact that you can embed just about any type of media into your "pinboard" or "learn board".  Perhaps the key to these sites is that they remove a bit of self-consciousness to those who participate.  Users do have an avatar or picture of themselves, but nothing too different from other social web sites.  This facilitates an openness that welcomes participation. Studies have shown that with less risk of being upbraided, people tend to collaborate and overall perform better.  

While Pinterest has a lot of participants already, Learnist is just starting.  The key to the site's success will be a large number of users.  I am sure it will catch on soon.