Hi I'm Harlen Makemson, I'm an associate professor in the school of Communications at Elon,
and we're going to talk a little bit today about using what's called web curation
that can be used to enhance what you do in the classroom and out of it.
Web curation is a
hot topic right now in my profession, ex-profession journalism as
a way people are gathering information sorting information and making sense
of it on the web. But I'm going to show you a few ways today you can also use it in the classroom
to get students interested in topics
in some cases even do research on topics and in one extreme example sometimes
could lead them towards jobs. First I'm going to talk a little bit about what web
curation is. One definition from the open dictionary what web curation
does it gets at what this is about how it's different from blogging which I know a lot
of us have used blogs in the past i used it
with a course abroad in january term
from sort more of a way of doing a journaling about a class or
about a topic.
This is slightly different. Conten curation has to do with taking all
the stuff that's on the web right now and trying to make sense of it,
trying to find a way to make it where people can understand it
better, where they can sort through all the stuff you have to go through now
on the web. Generally this is around specific topics obviously a course would be a topic
or you can drill down and do it by topics within a course. The big
difference with content curation is it's not strictly speaking aggregation
you're not just gathering stuff together
and it's not automated where it's, you know,
fed to you automatically based on keywords. The difference is there's a human being there.
They're the ones making the decisions what's relevant, what's
important,
what do you need to know about this that particular topic.
As I mentioned at the at the open this has become a
really growing area on the web both for journalism and for marketing and
for people just trying to figure out what is relavent in that sea of information.
So I'm going to talk a little bit about how,
if you're not familiar with it, some things you can go and look at online
to sort of get a sense of what content curration is about professionally and then we're going to talk
a little more about how you might want to do this in the classroom.
First why content curation? I've mentioned the information
that's on the internet right now well it's just going to get worse folks. Some
experts who follow this
say it's not going to be too long until every long holiday weekend
every three days,
content on the web will double.
So if you can imagine how difficult it is now to keep track of what all is
going on on the web, imagine what it going be like in the future. So again, this is
an area where having people do the sorting,
having to tell you
at least here are some things you at least might want to take a look at is becoming increasingly
important.
Some of you may have read the "Filter Bubble," by Eli Pariser.
I assigned it for a graduate courses this year.
In it he sort of points out that not all search is created equal anymore
either. Where
it used to make you go to Google, and we'd all get the same result. Well, no it's
personalized now so my search for Google on a topic and your search on
Google for a topic may be completely different depending on what we can look
for
on Google for so we can't just specially say we'll go to google
to find the answer because of the personalization issue,
we're now not even getting the same search results. So again another reason why
having a human being
sort through things on a topic,
code them, categorize them, give context and background is increasingly
important,
in general on the world wide web for information.
A couple of examples
on the web that you, if you're not familiar with this, you may have seen
curation and not known it, but here are a couple that I like to point students
towards.
Jim Romenesko does a curation about, calls it a blog but it's really a curation, he
finds relevant information about the news media and the news media business
and you can see the post from the day was based upon, or at least
the genesis of it was a tweet
sent out
about Mitt Romney was giving a speech at the museum and then,
in a bit of irony, the reporters
were kicked out of the museum, it's about the news
So he finds information about the news business and about the First
Amendment
and then annotates it, and gives context to it.
A lot of things that curation could open discussions about,
Romenesko used to do this under the pointer.org umbrella, pointers a
journalistic organization that does training,
he left pointer because of some controversy about whether he was quoting
too much from the original sources, again curation, you're talking about things
other people have written.
So this
this has opened up some interesting discussion of what is okay to do on the
web, how much can you use of these
stories that you are curating
about. But Romenesko was one of the first to really do this, at least in my
field. Another one to look at it is the Atlantic Wire. It's a
part of the Atlantic Magazines online presence. An Atlantic Wire portion is
all curation, it's not any of their stuff but they take things from other
organizations,
or new stories going on and
give links from different places that are writing about it, and this is a
subsection now that some of you
may take the New York Times online or at least we didn't realize now you only get ten
clicks a month.
Well the Atlantic has taken to here's today's topics
and boil them down to a sentence or two so you want to spend one of you're ten links on the
month it gives you a sense of what might be relevant for you to click on.
Again, The Atlantic does much more expansive curations as well, but just a
couple examples of what i'm talking about here.
You're taking other things from the web that you find value in
and pointing people to them.
So a little bit how it's working in the professional realm on the world wide web in
general, and why it matters...