What is curating
Curating might be associated with Museums and Galleries and the curation of artifacts. The Institute for Cultural Practices offers these definitions:
- “Curating is the process by which a physical or virtual space is designed and formulated to include a collated, selected, interpreted and intended concept, which can be articulated through a variety of media”
- “The organisation, discussion and presentation of information including objects, facts and opinions, in order to create value and meaning to be understood by the public”
- “Curating is examining, researching and documenting a collection with the aim of making it accessible to the public. This is done through careful interpretation of the objects, space and text to curate an informative exhibition”
Digital curation is the curation of digital artifacts. In much a similar way, items can be gathered or curated and saved in a digital space. However to add further value, the digital curator can add information as a digital narrative to add context and detail. In a previous post I talk about making and telling a good story with the curation tool Storify.
Prof Simon Lancaster raises the distinction between sharing and hoarding
Curation tools
At their simplest curation tools can provide the means to create collections. These can be themed by topic. In some spaces, collections can be tagged to provide a useful way to re-find things you have curated. Examples might include:
I have to say that the majority of my curations are simply collections, albeit fairly well organised into themed topics. What stops me from adding extra value - for example adding a narrative - is the old chestnut 'time'. One of the values of curation tools is the ease and speed you can 'save' things and so often this is done in the moment where you don't have the time or head space to reflect on the item but want to save it to come back to. I'm pretty certain we are all guilty of collecting things we don't go back to for a long time, if ever!
There are a number of curation tools above I have yet to experiment with. I've found it useful thus far organising 'stuff' in different spaces and actually enjoy the variety. One thing I would say is not to overload your chosen space as a) it is overwhelming and b) you can never find anything.
Some examples of curations
Elizabeth Charles has a Scoop.it page on Information and Digital Literacy in Education via the Digital Path. She curates links to articles and adds a short narrative to provide her insight. Her page has received in excess of 36.5 K views.
Chris Jobling decided to curate the tweets and add his own comments using Storify
Having engaged for some time now in social learning, I have developed a number of strategies for coping with what is often referred to as information overload. One of these is curating or collecting stuff. But unlike that kitchen drawer we all have, the shoe box, the filing cabinet with no files; curation in the digital sense, allows you to organise by tagging. Retrieval for me is so much easier because of the visual way I curate.
What is Curating?
What is Curation? from
Percolate on
Vimeo.
Different Approaches
During the #BYOD4Lchat this week on curating I discovered new curation tools but more importantly what people were doing with them and why. I could so easily have been in the very 'information overload' position had I focussed just on the many tools. Rather than try and absorb them, I zoomed in on a handful. I was intrigued by the number of people talking about Evernote, Flipboard and Zite. These given the ongoing conversations are now on my list to explore!
Its always good to hear about a product by recommendation. But..that's not to say everything this community suggests will be right for everyone, though it is a good starting place. My colleague Sue Bamford raves about Pearltrees but I'm afraid it just didn't enthuse me despite creating a 'tree' or two and adding my pearls of information. Why I wonder? Was it the look and feel of the tool? It was simple to use. I think it's a bit like buying a car. Taking away the price tag, every car has four wheels, doors and an engine. The most basic car can get us from A to B. It can do its job. But we all know we make preferences with regards to shape, size and colour. For me its the layout of the pages when I look for information.
Terese Bird and Anne Nortcliffe talked about Mendeley. Could this be a replacement for Diigo? Again something to explore and help me organise academic papers and books. I'd like a tool that would pull in the book cover. That would help me recall what I had read.
I was pleased to see Flea Palmer share a paper on curation and the link as a core competency in digital and media literacy education. The paper 'explores the concept of curation as a pedagogical tool to embolden critical inquiry and engagement in a digital age' (Cohen 2013). It comes with a rich list of references and I now have some excellent pointers to articles on this fascinating topic to read. Thank you Flea! I think there is a lot more about this topic I have yet to learn about.
Don't discard the JISC list
This is still a good way to send and receive interesting gems of information. There are many lists out there so you do have to be selective or risk an overflow of emails! (A JISC list is an email discussion lists for the UK Education and Research communities).
Andy Miah has curated a list of social media tools through crowd sourcing. He put the call out via a JISC list he created and also on Twitter, and now has an excellent collection of social media tools on his blog he calls the A-Z of Social Media for Academia.
I personally keep a private blog of social media stuff tagging it as I gather. It works for me as I know I can go back in and find things.
However we curate, collect and store doesn't really matter so long as it works for you. I am grateful for being part of such a wonderful open sharing community as the combined efforts have certainly helped me to filter out what I don't need to see and focus on what I do. I curate what is of interest to me through the shared interest of others. Just in this short space of time I have learnt so much from everyone participating in BYOD4L. It has also given me the opportunity to go on and discuss what I have learnt, raise questions and along the way answer questions for others. We have together built a learning community.
Today's topic for BYOD4L is curating. I have to say I am a huge fan of curating tools to help organise the many interesting resources I come across into manageable chunks.
Curating allows you to collect and archive digital assets. Initially I began by favouriting tweets so that I could go back to them at a time I could look in more depth at the associated link to a article, website or perhaps video. I also began a private blog I refer to as my treasure trove of useful stuff! Here I could write a few lines, include links to the item of interest, maybe embed a photo or video. I the assigned a few tags to the post. The tagging is useful because as your collection grows, it means you can go back and find things by searching for that associated tag. Putting in a few keywords helps too as over the course of time that 'obvious' tag may not be so memorable!
Then in recent years, some really nifty and easy to use tools have been developed that enable a more visual way to collect and organise.
Below are some of my favourite tools and how I am using them. I should add that for this post I am just looking at this from the perspective of how I curate for my own needs. How I use this collections to share with others will make for a future post!
Twitter
I use Twitter daily, skimming through my lists. (If you don't know how to organise those you follow into lists take a look at this post: Creating lists on Twitter). Very often this takes place on my journey to and from work so from my mobile phone. If I find a tweet I want to save, I do so as a favourite.
Storify
We have been curating the tweets from the daily TweetChats as a Storify story. The tool allows you to curate social networks to build social stories, bringing together media scattered across the Web into a coherent narrative. We curated all tweets that contained #BYOD4Lchat. These display in a panel on one side and you choose which you wish to drag across to your story board. You can add text boxes at any point which helps to provide context for the tweets.
Scoop.it
This is an example of one of my 'scoops' - Talking a look at MOOCs. As I come across a article of interest I can simply enter the URL in the new scoop box and it is added to my collection. It automatically grabs an image from the webpage, the title and a few lines from the text. You have the option of adding your own thoughts in a further text box.
Chrissi Nerantzi is curating Smart Devices for Learning which will be of great interest to the BYOD4L community.
Bundlr
Whilst this doesn't look at nice as Scoop.it, those that like lists may warm to it. Again you can collect links and organise them in topics. I curate articles on Google Glass in one of my bundlrs.
Pinterest
I began using this tool to curate infographics. Previously I had saved the image as a file and stored maybe on my PC, laptop or pendrive. Very often I couldn't quite remember where or indeed after time remember exactly what I had saved. By creating themed virtual pinboards I can now access these from any device I choose to. You can pin images you see or upload your own. Some of the boards I have created include:
I had the opportunity to show Andrew Middleton and Rob Appleyard what Pinterest looks like this afternoon.
Paper.li
I created a BYOD4L digital paper using #BYOD4L and @melsiguk. This tool curates tweets and presents them into a newspaper like article. What I like about this, is that it captures a random collection of tweets from what could be a large community and quite often enables me to pick up on useful tweets I may have missed in the stream of tweets going through Twitter.
Edshelf
This a great tool to search for and curate apps by organising them into themed group. At the bottom of each BYOD4L topic page is a link to a collection of related tools curated using Edshelf. You can also embed your collection in your blog or website. See below.
My Edshelf collection of tools for CURATING
