Cultivate
AI tools & strategy
My own connectivist learning environment: a hub for professional development and a curated news feed. My first AI build, the experiment that started all of this.
What it is
Cultivate is a personal learning environment built on connectivism, where the network of people, tools, and sources is the point rather than a single closed app. It is a hub for my professional development plus a curated feed of AI-in-education news and futures reading, trainings, and conferences. It is a set of linked HTML pages with no backend and no build step, offline-first because I originally made it for an iPad while I was traveling a lot.
Who it’s for
Myself, first of all, built as a working model of a connectivist personal learning environment. It also serves educators tracking AI in education, since the architecture is deliberately adaptable: change the key variables and the same tool can be rebuilt for a different person, institution, or goal.
The goal
Keep my AI and EdTech professional development organized in one place, and surface the right resource, deadline, or reading at the right time. It replaces scattered bookmarks, notes, and calendar reminders with one calm space designed around how I actually work, between classes, in office hours, or offline on a plane.
How it works
The most involved piece is a curated RSS news feed run through a custom keyword classifier that routes each article to the right tab, a multi-proxy fetch waterfall so feeds still load when one proxy fails, and local caching so articles stay readable offline. This was my first AI build and the experiment that led to everything after it. I still use it, and I built the rest of this work from what it taught me.