Tech for Curating.
“Content curation” has become a buzzy marketing term, but there’s value in teaching students how to collect, store, and act on information.
As 21st-century educators, we are called upon to perform a variety of roles. This week’s posts are highlighting online tools that can help us with these tasks.
Photo by Ryan Stefan on Unsplash
If you google “curation,” many of your top hits will be about digital content curation. Your hits will be things like “13 content curation tools that every marketer needs” or “The three most effective content curation strategies” or “Improve your content curation: 23 tips from the experts.” If it’s a listicle, it’s always suspect in my book, but this is worse. The web marketing crowd has glommed onto a concept and sucked it dry of any inherent value: it’s all about clicks and getting eyeballs to stay on your webpage long enough to make a sale or increase the advertising value of your website. It’s all rather dispiriting. And as the New York Times put it in an article about the overuse of the word: “When everything is ‘curated,’ what does the word even mean?”
If there’s one good thing about curation’s “buzziness,” it’s that it has shaken the word a little bit loose from its museum and gallery connotations. When we curate at a gallery or a museum, we are preserving items we think have special value. Historical preservation can conjure up dusty, fusty rooms and exhibits. Web marketing’s use of curation has debased this notion of preservation: the whole point about creating content for the web is to always be adding to it, finding more of it, never standing still. While that might bring some energy to the idea of curation, it’s not really a step in the right direction.
When we use curation in an educational context, however, we can thread the needle and come out ahead. Instructors are natural curators: we find information that we want to pass on to students, in the hope that they will learn from it and be changed by it. We don’t want them to store it, and we don’t want them to consume it only to forget it. We want them to kind of split the difference and act on it.
Two apps can assist instructors and student curate information and work with it:
there are lots of different link aggregators and collectors, but the one I use quite a bit is elink.io. It’s a commercial product that’s intended for the web marketing I’ve just been complaining about, but it can create very nice looking collections of links that can also be easily converted into newsletters. The collections embed well in other webpages, and the browser extension makes it easy to collect items.
Hypothes.is is billed as collaborative annotation - it lets you annotate almost any kind of text on the web. You can set up groups (such as a course) so that members can read and comment on the same online document. I mention it here because curation as an educational tool shouldn’t be thought of as just collecting stuff - you have to do something with it. Analyzing and discussing it is the first step in that process, and Hypothes.is helps with that.
For Fall Term 2020 this blog will be exploring issues informing education during a pandemic. It is appearing as part of a graduate seminar on online teaching and learning. You can read more about the seminar or see the other posts.
Post 57/60.
