Why and How We Should Curate Content for Our Students

Multimedia curator Robin Good believes that content curation and education are intertwined. Recently, Howard Rheingold** posted this video podcast interview in 2011 with Good about curation-"What is is, what it requires, why it's important and how to do it".  



Good's Content Curation for Education and Learning presented @Emerge 2012 also helps you to wrap your mind about how content curation is different than just sharing through social media.  It is the intent to contribute to the global brain which goes deeper than just liking something or tweeting it or re-tweeting. Curation is about making sense of a topic for a specific audience. It is not only that the overwhelming abundance of information begs to be organized, it is also the necessity for giving context to information --especially for our students. 

The emergence of open courseware, elearning depositories, creative commons, etc. help us to create our own teaching materials and at the same time remind us of the growing need for evaluation of resources.  Students are increasingly required to comprehend a topic from multiple perspectives.  It is our job as librarians to explore topics with them and enable that to happen. The books we buy, the courses we teach are increasingly multidisciplinary. The skills which the 21st Century workforce needs increasingly require collaboration and social intelligence. In our Integrated Global Studies School the IGSS  teachers are taking control of their own courses by creating their own interactive textbooks/course materials. Good gives the example of Knowmia which has thousands of video lessons from great teachers around the world which would facilitate flipping the classroom.  There is currently enough video available from everywhere, if you have the time to curate it, to flip your classroom instruction and give more individualized attention to each student. Here is Good's rich collection of curated education websites which teachers can use to create their own content.

To view a Mindomo map of all the curation tools mentioned by Robin Good: click here.


From Robin Good, who I follow on Scoop.it , I am now learning from Joshua Merritt, Sr. Manager of Content & Creative Strategy @BMC Software.

In Will Richardson's new book, Why School, I learned that effective  21st Century learners understand the benefits of "learning from strangers". 

Upon reflection, I also realize that the only way to keep up with what's really going on with 21st Century education is to learn from others at the pace that our students are learning from others. Which means read, read, read....online.


I enjoyed Merritt's recent blog post stating that if "curating content is easy, you're doing it wrong". 

• Stop playing the volume game. ---put quality first

• You need an opinion --what value can you add?

• Dig far and wide --look for unique perspectives

• It pays to cite your sources.

Treat curating like you are creating original art.

• **Rheingold is a visiting lecturer in Stanford University‘s Department of Communication where he teaches two courses, “Digital Journalism” and “Virtual Communities and Social Media”. He is a lecturer in U.C. Berkeley‘s School of Information where he teaches “Virtual Communities and Social Media” and where he previously taught “Participatory Media/Collective Action”.