Why digital gardens?

🌳 The benefits of digital gardens for TLs

There are many! See the Google Slides presentation below.

🌳 Space to think

In order to create, we need to reflect and make links between ideas (Munro, 2019); but in the contemporary digital landscape, we are more used to posting and moving on (Caulfield, 2015).

Digital gardens are different, separate, slower spaces that encourage creative and reflective work, and include professional and personal interests in ways that intertwine (Basu, 2020).

Posts are explicitly 'works-in-progress', rather than 'works-as-performance', creating a low stakes environment that encourages imperfection, experimentation and revision (Appleton, ca. 2021a).

🌳 A domain of one's own

Following the deterioration of X, formerly known as Twitter (Romano, 2023) - see embedded link below - the social media environment has become highly fragmented (Weller, 2023). It's unclear when, or even if, another platform will ever have a similar reach (Weller, 2023), and that's left a lot of online education communities digitally homeless. Some of us have even been forced to use LinkedIn. (Just joking! I'm on there too!)

However, when you have "a domain of [your] own" (Tedx Talks, 2013), such as a digital garden, you always have a home base for your ideas and creative work, which you can share on other platforms (Tai, 2023).