How to use a blog post as a learn node
sending pedagogical traffic into your OER -- open educational resource :)

A note from Judy Breck:

For the past several months I have been building a blog called Learnodes.com:
http://www.learnodes.com/
The blog has begun to generate visitors from search engines to OER links mentioned in my posts. I realize that the way I am doing this could become a method for improving the awareness and general use of OER resource.

learn node

The Learn Node method crystallizes and formalizes techniques that have emerged informally. We know these things work. Doing them consciously, collaboratively and intensely could significantly increase the awareness and use of open educational resources by students, teachers, researchers and the public.

Learn nodes implement the fundamental network platforming of OER.

network

The learn node method is a way individual academic experts can add their own online guidance in sending pedagogical traffic to quality knowledge resources in their fields.

A learn node is a tool for sending an online visitor into an OER asset that is of specific interest to that searcher -- causing that person to think: "hey, this is a great resource" and be likely to bookmark the asset, enriching the micro subject's connectivity.

Learn nodes are a way to interlink OER resources among themselves at the micro level by subject -- MIT, with Open University, with Smithsonian -- creating cognitive patterns of high value for learning.

The following are actual clicks through Learnodes.com blog posts into Web pages.

clicks list

 

 

THESE ARE THE STEPS:

Choose a target OER Web site where you want to send traffic.

Select a cognitive subject at a micro level -- a node, tidbit of the subject - - within your target OER Web site. Unbundled*

Write a post that provides some knowledge about that micro subject and that hyperlinks to your target page inside the OER Web site.

Create a micro cognitive pattern by mentioning and hyperlinking in the post to some other related nodes of knowledge that you respect.* (These links will help make your learn node attractive to search engine spiders. The SEO - search engine optimization - people call this "giving juice.")

Use keywords* (SEO) in your title, writing and tags the will entice search engine spiders. This causes your blog post to become a landing page for its micro subject: your blog post moves up the search engine listings sending traffic to the post, where visitors click through to your targeted Web page and other hyperlinked pages.

Publish your blog post. It becomes a node in the open* Internet that interconnects the pages you have linked to and that will find its way to being listed on search engines for your micro subject.

Invite colleagues, students and others interested in the micro subject to link to your learn node. (More juice*) This builds the open knowledge commons at the micro level, strengthening the subject's search engine optimization, moving OER into greater findability.

*Increases findability

 

View Blue Brain video (below) gives us a metaphor for the network of what is known by humankind that forms the global knowledge commons. Your learn node will be like one of the orbs that are neuron nuclei in the video.
Like the nuclei, your learn node will link to other nodes.

This video is from the Blue Brain Project Gallery. (Permission to use here has been requested.)