Content Curation
for Education and Learning:
Robin Good @Emerge2012
This map is reachable at:
http://bit.ly/CurationforEducationMap
What is Content Curation
Content curation is the act of researching, finding, filtering, editing and collecting valuable information resources into meaningful collections, guides or galleries to help a specific group of people make sense/learn or be updated on a specific topic.
Curation comes from the Latin verb: "curare" which means "taking care of someone".
Content curation is NOT the same as social sharing, reposting/retweeting, liking or favoring a specific content item.
The question to ask is who are you
doing this for?
Social sharing and personal expression are about "me" and what
I like and find "interesting".
Curation is about making sense of a topic/issue/event/person/product/etc. for a specific audience.
Content Curation definition
Rohit Barghava:
Content Curation definition
Robin Good:
Why is Curation so relevant for
Education and Learning?
10 key reasons
1) There is an abundance of information that needs to be organized.
The goal is not anymore to learn or memorize it all, but to be able to identify which parts of it are most relevant to a certain goal/objective.
It's the age of sense-making.
The importance of new literacy skills
needed to navigate online info while being able to evaluate its reliability
2) A Growing Number of "Open" and Freely Accessible Teaching/Learning Content Hubs
The growth of Open Content initiatives and repositories shows that there are opportunities to create more value from the existing educational content available out there.
edX Coursera Participating universities: 16 Launched: 2011 Classes: 111 Total students: 800000
In 4 months Udacity has more than 5 times the number of students currently enrolled at Stanford and more active students than the combined enrolled student population of Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton and Yale in 2010.
Creative Commons
Announced on May 2, EdX is the joint creation of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard. The partnership strives to bring online learning to people across the globe and offers online classes for free. EdX courses include videos, quizzes, feedback, and more to help students navigate the material.
3) From a Static, Unchanging World of Information To a Constantly Changing One
The key goal is not anymore just to learn and master the key principles and discoveries of the past. It is rather to be able to monitor, filter and evaluate which are the most relevant information sources to utilize when constant change and new discoveries are the new status.
Digital literacy skills are therefore of the essence for both teachers, educators and learners alike.
Digital literacy skills are those skills needed to navigate and utilize the world of information equipped with appropriate research, analysis, critical evaluation and collection/curation abilities.
4) Real-World Information Is Not Held Inside Silos Like Academic Institutions Pretend
While the academic world, from elementary schools to universities is basically organized around subjects, the "real world" is a complex web of situations in which the "fields" we studied for so long but separately in school, are all deeply and constantly intertwined.
Curation fits in as a more appropriate approach to learning and to prepare for real-world work challenges, by allowing learners to construct meaning by having to research and to understand and to create new relationships between different information-elements.
By studying a topic through the creation of specific knowledge-artifacts such as collections, learning guides and data visualizations instead of through the memorization of lots of information separate information units, allows not only for discovering the true relationships between apparently distinct issues, but also for the discovery and comprehension of a topic from multiple complementary viewpoints.
Curated digital collections facilitate information seeking through well-designed collection structure (in other words, the organization among collection components), which should clarify relationships between collections and sub-collections, and at the same time accommodate expectations of both users and system managers
5) Fast-Food Information Consumption In Rapid Decline - Curation Is the New Search
People want to go from fast-food information access to quality and comprehensive info-hubs, possibly not-driven by commercial/advertising interests.
Linear text results sorted by secret algorithms are not good anymore to provide valuable quality answers and explanations.
6) Job Market Is Rapidly Changing
New Skills Needed
Outside of traditional professionals as doctors and engineers, companies are looking more for skills and experience than degrees and certificates.
That's "over 30 percent of the working college graduates in the U.S."
The value of traditional CVs and resumes is rapidly fading
The value of educational certifications and degrees in the work world gradually fades.
"The diploma serves as a screening device that allows businesses to narrow down the applicant pool quickly and almost without cost to the employer, but with a huge financial cost to the individual earning the diploma (often at least $100,000), and to society at large in the form of public subsidies."
"...diplomas are a highly expensive and inefficient screening device used by employers who are afraid to test potential employee skills..."
From the New York Times: "...Mr. Zimmer warned against viewing the workplace as a “collection of buckets or isolated specializations,” and he emphasized the interconnectedness of different fields and skills."
10 skills that we believe will be vital for success in the workforce:
ired outcomes
Transdisciplinarity: literacy in and ability to understand concepts across multiple disciplines. More about transdisciplinarity.
Virtual collaboration: ability to work productively, drive engagement, and demonstrate presence as a member of a virtual team. More about virtual collaboration.
Sense-making: ability to determine the deeper meaning or significance of what is being expressed. More about sense-making.
Social intelligence: ability to connect to others in a deep and direct way, to sense and stimulate reactions and desired interactions. More about social intelligence.ility to represent and develop tasks and work processes for des
Cross-cultural competency: ability to operate in different cultural settings. More about cross-cultural competency.
Cognitive load management: ability to discriminate and filter information for importance, and to understand how to maximize cognitive functioning using a variety of tools and techniques.
Novel and adaptive thinking: proficiency at thinking and coming up with solutions and responses beyond that which is rote or rule-based
Computational thinking: ability to translate vast amounts of data into abstract concepts and to understand data-based reasoning
New media literacy: ability to critically assess and develop content that uses new media forms, and to leverage these media for persuasive communication
7) Alternative certification systems are emerging: Open Badges
Tuition costs for certified academic programs are at an all-time high while value of this courses on the job market keeps decreasing.
Subtopic
8) Teachers and professors can now curate their own textbooks
"...teachers can (and should) take control of their courses by creating their own interactive textbooks"
9) Educational Marketplace Open to Thousands of Competitors - Anyone Can Teach a Course Online
There is a large availability of free or affordable tools to create, find, edit and publish valuable content
There are now tens of learning marketplaces and platforms that allow anyone to offer and sell courses online.
Today, anyone can become both a "resource", a supplier of content as well as a curator/editor/publisher of new curated content resources such as book collections, expert guides, curated and annonated lists of resources, examples and templates galleries.
The educational marketplace is now open to thousands of small competitors.
It becomes increasingly easy to find and get in touch with the brightest people in every area of interest.
Marketing is education - Education is marketing
In the same way that the dissemination of music is no longer owned by a handful of music companies and book publishing is no longer controlled by a handful of book publishers, education is no longer the exclusive realm of large, formal institutions.
10) Growing Demand for Trusted Guidance Over Learning Content and Curricula
With so much abundance and difference in quality, learners express a growing demand for trusted guides to help them in selecting quality learning sources.
There is a growing need to find relevant and reliable resources when the offer becomes so broad
Finding and selecting quality open educational resources
Collaborative - Social Curation
is the Future
Collaborative curation project
for emerge2012
The goal
To collaboratively edit a collection
of great examples of "curation" at work in education and learning.
How we are going to do it
By collaboratively editing a mindmap
where each one can add a relevant web examples of a curated collection that has been used for education or learning
it's free
Additional resources
on Curation:
Content Curation and Related Resources
Curation at work:
great examples
Content Curation Tools
Education specific
Learnist
McGraw-Hill Create
Diigo
Content Clippers
News
Newsletter
Video
Mindmaps
Timelines
Images
Art
Content Curation: How To Approach It If You Are Just Starting Out
1) Find great curators
If you want to combat information overload, I see this as one of the surest ways – find people who are already doing a great job making sense of the areas you care about. Follow them. Engage with them. Encourage them.
2) Learn how to be a curator
If you really want to learn a body of knowledge or skills (or whatever other learning area you define), it is really hard to beat becoming a curator for that area. In a sense, this is what academics have always done. They focus in on a particular discipline and spend their lives researching, writing about, and (less and less) teaching it. The good curator does much the same, though typically in a less formal way and with no promise of tenure.
"A curator of information is really just a good researcher and organizer of information and this should be part of language arts, social studies, science, and other areas."
by Jennifer Funk
Key benefits of
content curation
For academic institutions /
For training organizations
a) Opportunity to create new value from their existing resources and assets
b) Opportunity to create new value instead of "imparting" and certifying old information.
c) Opportunity to become true incubators of talent
Talent development
Become breeders of talent for the industry
d) Opportunity not to depend in the future from the binding of teaching and certification
e) Opportunity to become the new Google of knowledge
Curation is the new Search
Library collections (both digital and physical) are resources that provide evidence for inquiry, serving archival and logistic roles. Thus, an important criterion for evaluating collections is their ability to serve as evidence for learning.
For learners
Immersive and holistic/comprehensive approach to learn any subject, collaboratively
"Critical and creative thinking should be prioritized over remembering content"
Curation trains students in developing the very skills needed in the future
Allows to learn and comprehend a topic in a multi-dimensional way
Helps learners see the "forest" from the trees
Helps learners "see" and understand the relationships and links that connect various domains and activities.
Learning by composing a puzzle that includes research, investigation, collecting, editing and presenting.
It provides an opportunity to generate on an ongoing basis learning and sense-making collections immediately useful for others
