Wednesday, 16 July 2014

Day 3 #BYOD4L Curating by @suebecks

Image source: http://pixabay.com/en/social-social-media-internet-371648/

I am a self confessed collector of stuff both in the physical world and the virtual. Some may say I am a hoarder and perhaps if you saw the contents of my loft you might agree! However I know what is up there and know one day each of my 'treasures' will have a part to play in some way.

I am a visual learner and find it easier to recall information when I see images. Collecting or curating resources and saving them in a logical order has helped me greatly. I can go back and find things more easily using the variety of curation tools in my personal learning toolbox. My growing collections often provide me with inspiration for teaching and research as I look through them. When I come across ideas, successful projects, innovative teaching approaches or research shared by others I can save it in my various spaces. 

So what are these tools you might be asking? I like to keep trying new ones but to give you a flavour of the tools I use most here is my Top 5 list

I use Scoop.it and Pinterest to gather articles, blog posts, videos etc and organise these into topics. Diigo is a social bookmarking tool which I try perhaps less successfully to gather resources relating to my research and teaching interests. I need to become more disciplined to make best use of Diigo however and hit the save button more frequently! Paper.li is a great tool that allows you to auto create a newspaper view of tweets. Finally my private blog provides me with both a reflective space and a means of making notes about resources I have found. The posts can be tagged and this helps me find and return to pieces I have written. The blog is private as it only makes sense to me. Its a bit like that kitchen drawer you have where you dump all those useful bits you haven't quite found a home for!


New resources

At Sheffield Hallam we had a f2f meet-up to discuss curating and how we used this personally to organise ourselves and also how we had introduced such tools to our students. Andrew Middleton recorded a summary of our discussion using SoundCloud on his iPad.


Thanks to Anne Nortcliffe I will now be exploring Mendeley and Colwiz more deeply. Anne shared a video she has created on using smart apps for literature curation.




Advice

Start with just one tool and experiment. If this works for you, then introduce another. Over the course of time you will find it becomes easier remembering to save useful resources in the spaces you have chosen. 

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