BLOSMAbout Us
Our Mission: Learning beyond BoundariesLearning is in humanity's DNA. Most everything we do is driven by a curiosity to explore, understand, experiment and create. And nothing is more rewarding than doing so together.
However, educational experiences are often segregated. There are boundaries between learning environments both physical and virtual, within individuals and communities, as well as between peoples - sometimes by human design and sometimes by nature. Such boundaries cause gaps that can halt exploration and innovation.
Therefore we want to empower people to cross these boundaries by bringing together their divergent learning paths into one virtual environment, where they can collect, remix, create, share and co-create. All this connected to existing platforms and content providers, of course.
Indeed, we think it is unacceptable that we live in a world in which entertainment is more within reach and better organised than educational resources. In order to make humanity blossom we need a diverse education, for everyone. And that is why we started this endeavour.
Harnassing the metaphors of nature
developing new paradigms for a radically pluralistic worldBlosm is a project with the aim of making the educational process a democracy: a peer-to-peer community learning network. It aims to enable a paradigm shift from the agency of teachers to the agency of learners through a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). As of now, VLEs primarily give teachers ownership and the power to structure content; the learner is a mere consumer in this process.
We frame the learner as an explorer rather than a consumer, and as a consequence are putting the responsibility of finding content back in the hands of users. No advertisements. No unasked-for recommendations. We want to empower learners the take ownership of their own VLEs, and create their own idiosyncratic individual and collective structures - both inside and outside of schools, and always as an extension to non-virtuality.
We believe a learning environment should not exist out of static courses, but as dynamic gardens. We want to create a person-bound environment that is owned by learners in such a way that they can take it with them during any learning experience throughout their lives - as opposed to it being tied to specific institutions as is currently the case, where students lose access once they graduate (and where "old knowledge" becomes irrelevant and forgotten in static back-ups, instead of restructured to serve new purposes). Knowledge should be living.
Everyone is a teacher among peers in Blosm. Modifying imported paths, publishing new ones or sharing them with friends is done with a few clicks of a button. A classroom garden enclosure is created and shared in minutes. Third parties can develop garden elements to integrate with their existing platforms. Ludified elements further enhance the playful nature of the platform.
Community, inclusivity and plurality are our guiding principles. A project for the commons, which we will turn open source once the first prototype has been developed.