Curation: Creatively Filtering Content

BY SUE WATERS · JUNE 12, 2014

Source: http://theedublogger.com/2014/06/12/curation/

We are living in an era of information overload.  So much content is shared online that curation is needed as a way to get value out of the information flood.

Content curation is the process of shifting through the vast abundance of content on the Internet to select the best, most relevant resource, on a specific topic or theme,  so that we can organize, manage and collate the content for ourselves and share with others.

Content curation is about working smarter and not harder.  Content curation is also a reflective process; as you curate resources you reflect on their value.  Reflection makes new information stick in your brain.

Why is curation important?

Curation is a life skill and an important part of being digitally literate.  Educators need to know how to curate information so they can teach students how they can curate content for research, their interests and passion. As part of this process educators need to encourage students to curate information using techniques that address their own personal learning needs.

While at the Edutech National Congress & Expo I curated the best resources shared from the Edutech conference into a Flipboard magazine.  An important lesson I learnt from curating the Flipboard magazine is curation is a very personal process.  As individual we have our own different learning styles and techniques; and this can be reflected strongly in how we curate and share content.

The purpose of this post is to showcase all the different ways content was curated at the Edutech National Congress & Expo to:

• Provide a deeper understanding of curation.
• Provide inspiration to try alternative curation methods.
• Make you appreciate the importance of curation

The curation process

The curation process includes the following types of tools:

News discovery tools – used select and aggregate the content.  All about saving time by feeding you the most relevant content.  Examples of news discovery tools include Feedly, Flipboard and following a hashtag in Twitter.

Curation tools - used to display your content with context with organisation, annotation and presentation.  Check out these examples of content curation tools.

At a conference you might also use note taking tools such as Google Docs or Evernote to document information from each session, then supplement your information by finding additional content using news discovery tools and finally share the most relevant resources with your network using curation tools.

Curation tools

There are a gazilion tools you can use.; and which tools you use, and how you curate, is a personal as the tools you use to build your personal learning network (PLN).

Curation is as simple as:

• Find the tool(s) that you prefer to use for news discovery and for curation.
• Curate the content that helps you, and is helpful for others.
• Make it part of your routine to curate and share content.
• Popular Curation tools

Here is a summary of popular curation tools from our survey of 190 educators.