Could CGScholar be the new way of learning?

eLearning, LMS, Moodle, BlackBoard, MS Teams, Minecraft Edu.Ed.... what's next, and will it be any different to what we have tried, tested and lost interest in, together with our colleagues, students and managers.

'AI', 'Big Data', user-centric, student-centric, platform-agnostic, blended-learning, online vs offline, multi-media, technology-enabled, no technology, mobile-learning, no-mobile learning... confused yet? I certainly am starting to be... disillusioned about all the hype, and am not seeing as much learning as was promised, by yet another vendor, who has now finally got it right in their product.

From my initial introduction to this rather well-hidden platform, via Innovative Networks, and the promise of a "social learning" technology, I'm open-minded and rather hopeful that I will find something refreshingly different(iated?) to employ in my courses, lessons and learning community.

I really liked the initial onboarding, being asked to confine my bio to a twitteresque 140 characters, which forced me to reflect on which of my personas to portray as I enter into a completely unfamiliar space, not knowing the population size or makeup, but thanks to the prompt to connect with my new community, I now am part of 4 communities, and have 7 peers, most of the requests that I sent out for 'computer science', 'ict' and 'Cambridge' having been accepted already, indicating that these people are also online right now, unless there is some auto-accept friend requests that I have yet to discover.

The net result of CGScholar's initial guided, effortless and simple three-phase welcome to the platform is one of a warm welcome, meaningful and dare I say, artificially intelligent connection to people whom I would really like to connect with, but wouldn't expect a reply from were I in LinkedIn, or worse, Facebook.

Now, if I can just figure out how to "Post to Community" without offending my community, I shall be suitably impressed, encouraged and persuaded that CGScholar is worth implementing with my middle and high school students, with whom I am due to reconvene our studies for the second semester of the year, next week.

So far so good!