http://www.pearltrees.com/

The basics

Pearltrees claims the following: “Easily organize what you’ve found on the web. The simple and intuitive interface makes sorting your interests, your passions and your ideas easy. Pearltrees allows you to give a precise meaning to the content you’ve archived making retrieval and reuse a pleasure. You can also instantly share the content you’ve organized. In Pearltrees, everything is public. All other users can see what you’ve organized and you can see everything that others have collected. This lets you easily find users with common interests and when you do, you can team up with them and curate a topic together. Pearltrees also lets you discover a web organized by others.”

Pearltrees basically involves putting links to websites and other online resources into a structured form, grouping these individual ‘pearls’ (of wisdom) into macro categories, all linked together. However, it deeply embodies the spirit of knowledge networking by linking individuals to other individuals as well, thereby enabling a ‘crowd-sourced’ tree of knowledge.

What needs to be explored

Pearltrees has a graphical interface which, at first sight, is confusing or (at least) not especially intuitive. We need to explore whether the power of this interface (which provides a much richer set of features for editing, sharing and arranging content, including links to twitter, facebook and so on) is such that the time taken to learn it is worthwhile. On the other hand, this comment is made from the perspective of a more traditional web user who has a text-oriented approach. It may be, in fact, that the graphical interface works better for some students!

While there is a mind-map feeling to the displayed results, and explicit use of the term ‘network’, it is not clear that this feature is anything more than display — it is not possible to re-arrange the pearls (the nodes) in the tree of knowledge to connote some relationship between them. However, the graphic display is more inviting to use. Here is a picture which demonstrates what a pearltree might look like:

A sample of the screen view in Pearltrees

Here is an example of using Pearltrees to organise information, in this case from the commentator Lucian Duma (@web20education) , how Google tools can support e-learning:

Pedagogic Challenge

The challenge is for a teacher to become proficient with pearltrees and create a rich resource set, carefully organised and developed, which then becomes the basis for students’ exploration of the content, guided in part by the scaffolding implicit in the arrangement of the knowledge. In other words, how can the arrangement of material be used to take the place of explicit instructions, so that students feel they have more freedom and yet are not left swimming in a sea of information?

Alternatives

There is no alternative to Pearltrees in terms of its interface and visual display. However, individuals probably will find Delicious more easily used; groups can use Diigo.