Curation

=Thing 33: Curation Tools = Curation activities inherently require higher order thinking. It is obvious that curators must constantly evaluate content. What content is worthy of re-posting or linking? What content should be lost in the sea of information? A curator’s reputation is directly tied to how appropriately the curator evaluated content.

=Introduction = What is “digital curation”? Traditionally, we think of a curator as someone who selects objects, interprets context and manages collections in a museum. But it also describes what librarians do with their collections, aka: collection development. And if you’ve ever selected, evaluated and organized a collection of great web resources for a research project, then you’re a curator! 

So why the explosion of digital curation? With so much content on the Internet, that varies enormously in quality, there’s huge value in relying on experts to select the best content for a topic. And with that need, many new tools have been developed to make it very easy for anyone to select, collect and share their collections of digital resources.
 * Why Curate? **


 * Discovery Exercise **

**Sharing Your Know-How:** No one can be an expert on everything, but we all have things that we’re passionate about and perhaps even are experts in. If we create collections of the best resources on those topics and share them, everyone can benefit from our expertise. This is also a great way to share information about what’s going on in the school with parents and other educators.

**Digging for Gold:** You may not feel like creating collections of resources yet, but you can still benefit from these services. They are goldmines of great material. If you find an expert in an area you’re interested in, then you can follow what they’re curating. They’re filtering out the dreck for you and sharing the most valuable resources. Student Use: Students can gather materials for research, create bibliographies, create collections of news articles around a topic, collect graphics for art projects, and so much more.

**Essential Skills:** Students learn essential literacy skills when curating content: how to search for and evaluate resources, how to organize and create a balanced collection. Check out this excellent handout on [|Building Link Collections] to help students learn these skills. From the article [|Teaching Kids to Curate Content Collections].


 * Resources **

These are quick reads and will get you up to speed on the why curation is important, both for you professionally and as a skill to teach students.
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">[|Curation] – a 2012 article by Joyce Valenza that covers all the reasons why we need to become curators and help our students learn this skill.
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">[|Content Curation: Tools and Strategies for Teachers]
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">[|Essential Skills for the 21st Century: Teaching Students to Curate Content]
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">[|Developing Digital Literacy Through Content Curation]
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Infographic: [|Content Curation Done Right]
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">[|#EdTechChat: Student and Teacher Curation] – tips gleaned from an #edchat on curation.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">TYPES OF TOOLS
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">**Social Bookmarking**: [|Diigo]is one of the most popular tools for collecting and organizing (maybe?) web resource. With diigo you can save links to your favorite websites, add notes and tags to help describe them and improve findability. It also includes a variety of social features that let us share our bookmarked sites with others. Diigo also has collaborative features that can be useful for groups sharing resources.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Is this Collecting or Curating? Some would argue that this is simply “collecting” and that may be true. It depends on how much thought you put into your selections and how effectively you organize them. As an example, I collect lots of links to articles and resources that look like they might be useful for future updates to the Cool Tools workshop, my raw collections are disorganized and may not be of much use to anyone but me. But when it comes to updating these Cool Tools lessons, I use those lists to curate the resources that are most relevant and helpful.

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 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Diigo **

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">**Digital Curation** tools take these ideas further. Digital curation tools encourage you to select articles, photos, videos, tweets, websites and other online content about a topic or idea and organize them into a coherent collection that you can share with others. Some digital curation tools let the curator add notes to explain context, offer opinions and ask questions. These collections can be great resources for discovering and keeping up with information. And these tools can be very helpful for students gathering resources for research projects and even for presenting a research project. They can gather information, write notes and reflections on the material, share information in groups and all the while, teachers can be following along and participating as needed. Presentation of the collections is a bit “prettier” than traditional social bookmarking tools. Some tools in this category include: [|Scoop.it], [|Symbaloo], [|Storify], [|EduClipper], [|EdShelf] and [|Pinterest]. (Some tips on [|How to Curate Like a Rockstar])


 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Symbaloo **

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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">**Learning Playlist** tools like [|LessonPaths] (formerly MentorMobEdu) and [|BlendSpace] have a distinctly educational twist. They focus on providing a platform for curators to create learning experiences. After deciding on a topic, you gather resources – tutorials, videos, web pages, readings, etc – that will help your audience learn the topic at hand. Then arrange them in an order that will help the learner progress from one skill level to another. Useful in a flipped classroom type of setting or as reinforcement for skills learned in class.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">**Content Aggregators:** This group of tools takes a different twist on curation. They take the sources you specify and provide you with a selection of materials from those sources. Tools like [|paper.li] scan your Twitter and other social media streams and produce a selection of the most popular articles mentioned by the people you follow. Another similar tool is [|Flipboard].

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 * Paper.li**


 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">And even more tools: **


 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">[|More Curation Tools] : Donna Baumbach used BagTheWeb to create a collection of curation tools.
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">[|Curation Tools] : Joyce Valenza’s collection of curation tools on EdShelf.
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">[|Content Curation] : more tools than you could ever hope to test. Well organized collection curation tools by Robin Good.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Read an article or two about curation from the "Resources" list – either from the sources here or find something new and share it with us.
 * Task 1 **


 * Task 2 **

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Pick at least one curation tool that is new to you and create a small collection on a favorite topic, your favorite apps, tools for your classroom, resources for a lesson, etc. You choose! Share this list in your blog post.

=** Blog post **=

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Write a blog post reflecting on how you think you and your students can use one of the curation tools presented. Which one did you like best and why? What benefits do you see to having one or more curation tools? How do can these tools help you professionally? Personally? = =