The Web is abode to vast amounts of information which makes it difficult for those who access it to actually find what they are looking for quickly and easily. A need for guidance is felt during accessing
the Web to find the best information, and to make sense of content that comes from a variety of disparate sources. The process can be easy for everyone if they can create and follow simple paths of resources to learn anything they want. To facilitate people to decide from where they should begin when they want to learn about a particular topic or concept and to help them reform their DIY (Do-It-Yourself) learning experience, the platform Gibbon was built.
Gibbon is a peer-to-peer learning platform where everyone can learn and teach with the help of playlists. A playlist is an easy way to share articles, links, videos and books to learn anything. Gibbon offers a space where everyone can learn from each other by sharing what is available on the Web.
To get the most out of Gibbon, you should understand two things that you’ll be using on Gibbon, these are:
Learning Flows: Are Gibbon’s textbooks that are made by the teachers on our platform. Everybody can create them as they are very simple to make. A flow consists of chapters. Each chapter is an article, blog, or video handpicked from the internet by the teacher.
Playlists: Playlists consists of chapters from the learning flows you have selected. You can add a variety of playlists to create a more diverse learning flow. If you want to focus on a certain topic you can go directly to the flow and start learning there.
Gibbon is a great tool for DIY learning, here users sign up and then collect articles, links, videos or whatever they like from the web, and the site generates a playlist of lessons which can be shared with others. Each lesson is small in size and is easier to commit to memory, and each item on the playlist has a time next to it, indicating how long it will take to read.
Gibbon pulls together information more reasonably from the Web, and the lessons read more like articles than text books, which could be a better learning tool for certain learning types. Each guide shows the number of users that are reading the guide, the number of chapters it contains and allows you to mark the lessons that you’ve read and learned by clicking on ‘Mark as Learned’, at the bottom of every article. There is also a flagging option available using which you can report inappropriate content. Gibbon already has an extensive library of guides, but users can add their own guides, so if you want to share your knowledge you don’t have to type everything out, you can provide links to videos, articles, images and more, so users can relate to the information and gain knowledge.
Gibbon is a great tool for teaching and you don’t have to write endless articles for that. As a teacher you gather articles, blogs, or video’s on a certain topic to create your learning flow. Creating learning flows on Gibbon is really simple; here are the steps to it:
Go to your profile page and click on ‘create learning flow’.
Give your learning flow a title.
Add a short description which tells what your learning flow is about and who can use it.
Add some tags, which will be used to search for your learning flow in the Gibbon library.
Copy and paste the link of the article and a new chapter will be created.
Add as many chapters you like to have in your learning flow.
Your learning flow is automatically live and will be added to our library.
For learning on Gibbon, you can browse the library of Gibbon, which contains already created learning flows, categorized into featured, popular and new flows and also into learning flows on Design, Programming and Startups. Every learning flow reflects the number of students who are part of it and the number of chapters it contains. You can suggest your own chapters and also share the learning flow on social platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. In the library, you can find learning flows on a variety of topics such as Marketing and Communications, Art fraud, art forgery and art crimes, UI animation, Usability testing, Django Development, UX and Agile, Lifestyle and happiness, Light photography, Science of creativity and more. There are many learning flows that provide you with guides, tutorials and how-tos on particular topics. This facilitates learning on your own, at your own pace and according to your interests.
Gibbon encourages you while learning and teaching, by rewarding you with points and badges to keep your motivation high. Gibbon has also integrated time-management into it with the help of features such as a minute counter next to each article stating how many minutes to spend on each article, a feature which prompts you to schedule how much time you’d like to set aside each week for learning and then creates a weekly learning playlist from your selected flow which falls within your allotted time. Also, it’s integration with Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn, makes creating an account easy and sharing content even easier.
Gibbon follows the current online trend of democratizing education and utilizing the unlimited access to information provided by the Internet. I see huge potential in Gibbon and it is definitely worth a try. Share what you feel about Gibbon. The Comment Box is waiting.
