Lets drill down to how you might use this in the classroom
so certain thing we think about what students would get out of this
a few things as far as learning that they could take with them after
they leave Elon the first two you can kinda put together
critical thinking and analytical skills
the idea of a curation is that that your not just
finding or sending people to the first two three things you find on the web search
ideas that you're drilling down in your finding things that people might have
missed or people think that have particular
relevance so there's critical thinking involved
analytical skills
we think of the context you should think curation as value added so its not just enough for
students to find a link
but student should have to be able to
put it in large context be able to say why it matters be able to analyze these things a
little bit
writing in general
right so obviously huge
push in this university with the QEP
so writing in particular for the web that depends how deep you want to go
into this but you could talk about
things such as keywords and search engine optimization or it could be as simple
as are the using to grammar spelling
right so you can drill down as far as you want on that part of it
and persistence in time management especially a couple of a larger assignment im going to
talk about where they're doing it basically for entire semester
so this is going to be self driven on their part being able to
set aside... these dont have to be large in terms of total time but the thing where
they might have to check in on a regular basis and can they manage that throughout a
semester
again a skill they are going to need when they leave Elon as well so
your use of content curation you might not have all these in every assignment but
some things they can
learn from doing this type of assignment
okay so I'm going to show you a few examples of how I've learned this. two examples
how I've used this in classes and the third that i'm working on right now for
for next academic year
to give you a sense of how it can be used and you know
I'm far from the right person to have done this you can
search for content curation
education and find other examples as well But here are a few i've used this is one i've used
the longest
I teach ever semester a class on copy editing and publication design
and about three or
four years ago i started doing curation in the class because
this is a lot of where the editing function is going in the past where an editor or
newspapers editing things coming from the associate press and
determining what went into the paper
well online editors now are looking at what's going on
online and pointing their readers to it so even though it's not their content they're
pointing to things, other publication the writing about the subject of
interest
so my editing design class of students the first couple weeks pick a topic and its
uh... and that's a fairly
the umbrella has been newsy doesn't mean it has been
terribly serious to something that generates new content
weekly
and it's their content they own that
topic for the semester and
they have a floor they have to find at least two things per week
that are of interest on the web and annotate them
and sometimes students
kinda blow this off and don't do so well on it and sometimes students take it
beyond even when i thought they would do. this is a student from this
past semester who was really into fracking and was really concerned about the
environmental impact of it
wanted to do fracking as a curation, I said this sounds lik a really good topic
and she did exceptional job using keywords and finding information for a
wide variety of sources and annotating them
and at the end semester she told me that she had
environmental ngo had found her work on the web and had contacted
her and this start a conversation which by the end of the semester had led to a job
now this is not by far
not the norm you shouldn't expect this but
it gives you a sense of how this thing could have real world implications and
that
part of the curation processes that you're being read by others right so
you're writing for an audience
so again some students have done exceptional work on the curation and it's
led to really get things and
at a minimum they learn how to sort through all the
specially on the topic such as fracking some of the really
information sometimes conflicting they have to work through that those type of
processes that gets to the
being able to evaluate information
area
that's one way I've used it that probably one of the biggest project I do
second one uh is more of a traditional research project
so when I teach media history online
instead of writing a paper i've had them go in and in this case i've used
the tool storify the tool isn't that important you could do this with
wordpress
you could probably do it within moodle as well
but
the idea is to pick a topic and then you find
information on the web and traditional research sources such as
journal ect.
to be able to tell a story about
something happen in media history so
this student screen grab here did a topic on
media war
so the students found youtube videos you can see
on the screen grab this is a
famous vietnam piece by morley safer where american soldiers burn huts
that evening
you see below their links from the newseum about war stories she also used
traditional research sources
Storify is a tool that allows you to
sort of relatively easily bring together other things
such as
such as twitter such as youtube
but then gives you spaces to annotate them and to storeify is your creating a story
hence the term storify
it's a little different it still a curations that it's meant to be like one
encapsulized story
again this student one on a media war and found alot of information dating back from the
revolution
through the current conflicts and in afghanistan
and put together a really nice package again storify is one tool but if you
don't want to spend time, I wouldn't spend alot of time teaching any of these tools frankly
Because
students probably know at least one tool that can do the job
in one other the ways I have been thinking of working on currently and this could be
applied a number of different ways i teach a course advanced course in
design information graphics
so for next academic year
i'm planning on using pinterest
which is basically like a pinboard where you are able to pin up thing that you find
of interest on a topic
and I'm going to use it as an inspiration board so
assign students to find on a regular basis
an item or two could be any type of graphic design that they find
particularly well-done or poorly done
in an area
and with pinterest it gives you five hundred characters to be able to annotate
them and so again annotations not just enough to find the stuff they're gonna need
to tell me
why is this a good example or why is this a crummy example or
why was the typography so well done in this particular
area so for the graphic design class makes a lot of sense there's a lot
things every day are being put up on the web that have good or bad graphic design
i can also see something like this using pinterest or using some other tool as a
discussion story so they could be a political science class or
you know a class literature class where you could find current things
about a subject
that's a great discussion starter for class
so the other thing about this is the ability to be able to use it in your
face to face class
so you could take five minutes at the top of class sarah had this
great example of this page one layout from the huntsfield times sarah why you enjoy it?
so it allows you to bring that online experience into the classroom and
be able to tie somethings you are talking about that maybe
theoretical or not necessarily easy for them to
put into real terms this is one way you might be able to do it either through
images or through
article stories they find online