Chris – Curation sounds like a healing art, and perhaps it is. But I must say that with a caveat. In the spring of 2015 the world generates of 56,000 tweets every 10 … seconds. That’s right, 10 seconds! Over 30,000 hours of video is watch on Youtube in those same 10 seconds. No one can keep up with the data flow. So, having someone or something sort for you is essential, but the devil is, as always, in the details. Just who is selecting what will and will not be brought to your attention? Yahoo, Google … in fact all search engines, “optimize” your searches to bring to you what your metrics suggest you want to see and, for the right price, what advertisers want you to see. Now, these optimizations do not always work. We are all spammed with both male and female enhancement products, and I suspect that the actual hermaphroditic target audience of the combined efforts of these spammers is quite small, double entendre intended.
Governments, too, “curate” in that all governments practice some filtering of the internet, and many governments scrub internet content to protect themselves against critique, all in the name of internet security, harmony, peace, and tranquility, of course. China claims that it filters to keep pornagraphic materials off line. Oddly, “Tibet,” “protest,” “democracy,” and myriad other terms must be viewed as pornographic, because searches using these terms are either blocked outright or thoroughly scrubbed, even to the point of the searcher receiving a warning that the current search is illegal.
Absurdities aside, I am concerned that entities I do not trust presume to make choices for me. I trust my colleagues, my friends, and my family. Life has taught me to trust few others. That is why, as a curator, I am so careful with what I post. I know time is precious, which is why I respect others’ time as if it were my own. When I curate a site/app/service, it is because I believe the source is worthy of being passed on. In so doing, I hope to reduce the noise, so to speak, so that people who have come to trust my curation can find useful material.
Michael- Curation is the act of finding, reviewing (at various levels) and cataloging resources to use in your professional life. Obviously this podcast and blog pushes us to do a ton of curation as we go. In many ways it is a brain hack that forces me to curate content I come across like never before.
A workflow with little to no friction is the key to letting yourself curate content on a regular basis. I use Google Chrome and take advantage of the extensions available to help me. Both Safari and Firefox offer similar services.
These are the tools that help me curate:
- Diigo, to bookmark edtech resources for the Tech Tools Daily show
- Delicious to bookmark resources and share them for our weekly EdTech Podcast
- FlipBoard to help me add content to the magazines I put together for the online courses I teach.
- List.ly to help me add bookmarks that embed themselves in lessons I have on my website.
- Hootsuite to make sharing resources across multiple social media accounts easy.
Jamie – Like Michael I find that I am in the process of curating content all the time. I’m collecting lesson ideas through The Teaching Channel, using Diigo to collect articles for the podcast, Scoop it for interesting articles I want to read, and many more of the tools Mike listed above and some that we have reviewed over the past few weeks.
I think we can all agree that in our digital world has made content curation a must and without tools like the ones above we can’t possibly organize and use all of the information we come across. Today, many high school teachers and most middle school teachers teach skills in content curation. However, in the elementary classroom the discussions about curating content mostly center around encouraging teachers to curate content ahead of time so that students have a safe place to look for resources. But I also think that we should be teaching the skills of content curation at the elementary level. It definitely doesn’t look the same as the upper grades, but scaffolding should begin even as low as first grade. In our school we begin teaching students about databases, how to find resources, the structure of a library, and skills at determining if a source is just right for you to six year olds. We continue building on these skills through the rest of elementary so that when students enter middle school they know why analyzing and organizing content is an important life skill.
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