Digital Garden Coming Soon!
EcoGather aspires to evolve from a collection of community co-created online courses (spanning 300+ modules) into a well-tended learning commons. We are inspired by the practice of digital gardening, oriented toward “learning out loud” (also referred to as learning in public), and interested in curating courageous-yet-cozy spaces and experiences, both on the worldwide web and within the web of life.
Our early efforts in this direction were directly influenced by and we are indebted to:
- Rowen White, Cultivating a Personal “Idea Culture”: Creating linked and distributed notemaking to enhance relational memory and thinking
- Maggie Appleton on Digital Gardening
- Courtney Martin’s concept of Noble Friendships
The ideas of relational thinking and writing were also explored and practiced by Nicole Civita and Michelle Auerbach in their book Feeding Each Other: Shaping Change in Food Systems Through Relationship, written and published during EcoGather’s first phase. As we go forward, we intend to more fully center relational ethics in the very design of our lifelong learning network.
What is Digital Gardening?
Anthropologist and digital designer Maggie Appleton describes digital gardening as a “practice that treats a personal website as a constantly evolving landscape where you develop your ideas in public.” Appleton, who writes extensively about digital gardening at the individual level, highlights some technical features that can make digital gardens especially navigable (e.g. bi-directional linking, hover previews, visualizations and knowledge graphs). At the same time, she notes that digital gardens are characterized by two much more important features. They must be both explorable and slowly grown over time:
- Explorable. Digital gardens are not structured as a strictly linear steam of posts. Nor are they clustered into groupings like courses. Rather, they are highly explorable, with many varied potential paths between the content. This is usually achieved through deeply interlinking notes so that readers can navigate freely and follow their interests.
- Slowly grown over time. The entries (notes, or in our metaphor, plantings) in a digital garden are rarely presented or seen as “finished” work that is never touched again. Rather, many of the entries in a digital garden are “evergreen” – they can always be revised, updated, and changed as the author’s ideas develop. Thus it is helpful for a digital garden to have a system to indicate the original creation and last update dates for each entry and a way to indicate the level of development or “done-ness” of a particular entry to readers.
Appleton and others who write about digital gardens most often treat them as the creation of a single individual. EcoGather intends to create a group garden to support a cosmolocal learning community.
What is a Learning Commons?
As we transplant EcoGather’s teaching and learning materials into a digital garden, we aim to increase reach and course material engagement, lower entry barriers for new learners, and expand into diverse ways of knowing, including somatic, imaginative, and experiential approaches to learning. We want people to interact with and explore the EcoGather world, click through on elements of the worlds, and engage with ways of knowing, or ways relating and being from a range of angles and through paths that call to them.
Presently, the EcoGather team – along with interested members of our community – are articulating the features and management principles of a learning commons. In preparation for this, we devoted a full lunar cycle of EcoGatherings to Commoning.
This is about to culminate in a community-engaged generative session on “Re-Commoning” during which we will discuss how we, as a community, might develop a culture around keeping this learning commons useful. We will consider what each of us can contribute and what we hope to get out of the EcoGather learning commons. While we’ve been working on this project for several months, it is still in early enough stages that feedback can be meaningfully integrated. We want to understand what features might be most useful to the most likely to common with us – you!
As we learn to reawaken our commoner’s consciousness and resist enclosure in education, we are engaging with the writings and teaches of David Bollier, Elinor Ostrom, Sylvia Federici, David Dean, Nathan Schneider, and the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective, Vanessa Andreotti & Elwood Jimmy (especially in Towards Braiding).