Greg, an educator, author, consultant, and public speaker uses Learnist a bit differently from those of many other teachers. When asked Greg’s thoughts on Learnist and how he is currently using the site he explains, “Not only does Learnist provide students with well-organized and curated electronic resources on topics they’re studying, it models for them how a broader community of enquiry outside of – and informing – the classroom can work. For me, however, Learnist is much more useful as a platform for systematically bringing together resources I’ve been developing, finding, and organizing. You might say that at present, I’m less of a consumer than a producer. I’m creating supply, rather than articulating or channeling demand.”
Greg goes on to discuss how useful Learnist is for organizing resources he has been collecting and researching for years. Greg says, “For the last five years, I’ve been teaching online and hybrid college courses in Philosophy, developing course shells into comprehensive learning environments for classes like Ethics, Critical Thinking, and Introduction to Philosophy. This required scouring the web for quality resources on the topics I was teaching, so I could provide them to my students, typically non-majors taking these courses to satisfy general education requirements. It also involved developing a number of my own resources, ranging from web-pages on key points and concepts, to handouts and worksheets, interactive practice quizzes, pages of links to online texts, and even embedded videos.”
Greg also points out how he plans on using Learnist to develop learnings for life long learners. He mentions, “Over the last two years, I’ve started filming my own lecture and discussion videos and uploading them into YouTube. These were originally intended solely for my own students, but they quickly developed a still-growing following among lifelong learners and students at other institutions. Some of them began to request videos on other topics in Philosophy, Religious Studies, History, and even Literature, and this Summer I started shooting videos for a new sequence on Existentialist Philosophy and Literature, an ongoing, independent, entirely web-based course. I’ve used Learnist to create a board for that course, still in development, incorporating my growing YouTube playlist and the Googlesite pages I’ve been creating for that subject. I’ve also started playing around by creating other Learnist boards, including a recent one devoted to Platonic dialogues, and I’m strongly considering creating a number of smaller, more closely focused, topic-oriented boards in Philosophy over the next few months. I’m hoping to provide these useful mini-studies to my students in courses next semester, but I’m also using Learnist as a platform to offer the same well-structured content to a much broader audience of students, lifelong learners, and other educators.”
Follow Greg and his learn boards on Learnist here: http://learni.st/users/gbsadler
