Constructionism

Constructionism is a theory of education that points out teaching is a process by which information is deconstructed by one participant and then reconstructed by the other, which is an imperfect process. So having the learner build something meaningful publicly, they both demonstrate how they've reconstructed that knowledge and contributed to the societal body of knowledge. That project could vary from topic to topic, and something like digital gardens could easily count. Constructionism was coined by Seymour Papert and builds off of educational constructivism.

I'm a big fan of this theory, and I believe it mirrors how I study and process information into this knowledge hub. In fact, I think you could read this article about constructivism and see a lot of similarities with how they wrote their article (which they refer to as an example of constructionism) and how I treat this digital garden. That document also discusses how constructivism means taking a critical look at the "myths" that exist in education systems, and specifically calls out issues with our current education system (like the idea of objective truth and that the teacher plays the role of controller) that I discuss fixing with decentralized education. It also describes how the current system is self-reinforcing and calls for collective action over heroes, which I very much agree with.

Materials for a constructivist education would ensure the reader still has an active and participatory role in the process. To that end, I'm pretty supportive of interactive explanations of things, like you can find on Nicky Case's Explorable Explanations site, which frames play as an important aspect of learning. I believe this can work for even quite abstract concepts.

Alternatively, everyone maintaining their own public digital garden that represents their understanding of the world aligns with constructivism (and constructionism specifically), and is more or less what I believe orchard can achieve. In fact, the stuff muni town is building is very similar to orchard and they describe the purpose of Roomy as "learning in public" and seeding digital gardens, which feel very much constructionism-coded.