1. Curation in the Classroom:
Making Meaning & Adding Value
Shayne Russell
http://sqworl.com/xum2hf School Librarian
Presentation examples
Kenneth R. Olson Middle School, Tabernacle, NJ
shayne.russell@gmail.com
10. ...
identifying and organizing
information about a topic that
others have produced to share
with a learning community using
socially powered tools.
Spell with Flickr: http://metaatem.net/words/
11. Meeting Standards
AASL Standards for the 21st
Century Learner
1. Inquire, think critically and gain
knowledge
2. Draw conclusions, make
informed decisions, apply
knowledge to new situations, and
create knowledge.
3. Share knowledge and
participate ethically and
productively as members of our
democratic society.
4. Pursue personal and aesthetic
growth.
12. Meeting Standards
ISTE Nets for Students
1. Students demonstrate creative
thinking, construct knowledge and develop
innovative products and processes using
technology.
2. Students use digital media and environments
to communicate and work
collaboratively, including at a distance, to
support individual learning and contribute to the
learning of others.
3. Students apply digital tools to
gather, evaluate, and use information.
4. Students use critical thinking skills to plan
and conduct research, manage projects, solve
problems, and make informed decisions using
13. Going
1 beyond
Google
http://www.flickr.com/photos/wilhei/109403331/
14. Going
2 Seeing
the Big
Picture
1 beyond
Google
http://www.flickr.com/photos/wilhei/109403331/
15. Going
2 Seeing
the Big
Picture
1 beyond
Google
3 Learning
how to learn
http://www.flickr.com/photos/wilhei/109403331/
29. . . . powerful!
http://sqworl.com/xum2hf
Presentation examples
Shayne Russell
School Librarian
Kenneth R. Olson Middle
School, Tabernacle, NJ
shayne.russell@gmail.com
Editor's Notes
Curation is a buzzword that has been kicking around the business and marketing worlds for a few years now, and has started to filter down to education. Weโre familiar with the term as it relates to museums, but not everyone is clear as to what it means when we talk about curation in school.
You may have read articles or blog posts referring to curation as โthe new searchโ. What does that mean???
Thereโs simply too much information out there. People are less satisfied with a web search that yields millions of links to information. What they really want is either an answer or a few good resources that will help them construct their own meaning.
They want that information to be filtered by a trusted sourceโnot sorted by some secret algorithm or possibly driven by advertising interests. And thatโs what curators do.ย
Maybe youโve heard that โCuration is the New Content Creation.โAn equally mysterious claim, but an interesting one. ย
This is tied to the idea that there are no new ideasโeverythingโs a remix. View this great video when you have a chance: https://vimeo.com/25380454. The video talks about creativity not as something that happens in a flash, like the lightbulb turning on over your head, but as something that happens only after we copy or tinker with other peopleโs ideas.
So curators are not necessarily contributing original workโthey are making the ideas of other people readily available to us. But the value that theyโre adding is that when ideas are combined, and people begin to make connections, and maybe look a things just a little differentlyโdramatic things can happen. People are inspired by and build upon the ideas of others.
This is a common thread throughout history. Isaac Newton had some good ideas, and he acknowledged that they werenโt completely original!ย ย ย
so with that in mind, What is curation really?ย It helps to clarify What itโs notItโs not โsharingโ on social networks. Thatโs more of an โitโs all about meโ kind of thingโwhat youโre doing and what you find interesting. ย And itโs not building an all-encompassing collection. We saw this done especially in the early years of the web where someone would post a big long list of sites on a school website and call it โresourcesโ. There was no discernable order, and no annotation to give you a clue what criteria the sites had to meet to make the list.
Curation is Content curation consists of identifying and organizing information about a topic that others have produced to share with the learning community using socially powered tools.ย Curation has a specific audienceโand what youโre doing for that audience is helping them to make sense of a specific topic, person, event/product, etc.ย It involves finding information in a variety of formats from many sources, identifying subject experts, filtering, analyzing, and organizing and sharing the best pieces of content selected for a specific audience and a specific purpose. Youโre not just collectingโyouโre adding value. You may be blogging about it and adding your own comments and annotationsโand youโre putting it out there in a forum where others can discuss it (because, remember, you had a specific audience for it).ย Not that this is anything new. Librarians have been doing this for years. But Iโm suggesting we pass the torch to students and teach them to be curators. Why would we want to do that?
ย If we look at any set of standards dealing with technology and information literacy, we see that this is exactly what we want students to be doing. AASL Standardsโฆ
ISTE Nets for Studentsโฆ
A lot of the benefits students can gain by being curators are clear in these standards: critical thinking, evaluation of information, constructing meaningโฆ but there are others that are just as powerful.ย They need to learn how to find information without relying totally on Google. Theyโll need to use databases and specialized search engines. Theyโll learn about different information โcontainersโโhow is the information youโll find in an encyclopedia different than what you can expect to find in a magazine? Theyโll learn about primary and secondary sources. Hopefully theyโll compare, and question, and consider the source of the informationโoh, to give credit to those sources.
Only in school do โsubjectsโ fit into neat 40 minute boxes. We teach โscienceโ by itself; we teach โsocial studiesโ by itselfโฆ but the two never overlap. In the real world, all these subjects are interconnected and topics cross disciplines. People who curate information gain a broader understanding of their topic because they are able to look at it from different perspectives. How would a scientist view the topic? How would an anthropologist look at it? Curating helps us to make connections and construct a deeper understanding of a subject.
Weโre really teaching them how to learn. Letโs say we take a social studies class and we give them the assignment to become a curator on a current event that interests them, or maybe on some aspect of history that is underrepresented in their text book. Weโre not asking them to memorize facts and be tested on them. We are asking them to construct knowledge by piecing together information in different formats from a variety of sources. This is how people make decisions and solve problems in the real world.ย
So letโs take a quick look at some of the tools students could use to curate. There are LOTS of curating tools available. Iโve chosen to show just a few that I consider โentry levelโ tools. If youโre ready to stick a toe in the curation waters, or teach students to become curators, this might be good tools to begin with. Just be aware that there are many, many more.
First of all, we want them to have a way to save online resources they find and be able to find them again. They can save them using browser bookmarks, but then theyโre only available on the computer they were using when they bookmarked them. A social bookmarking tool would be a better choice. Diigo and Delicious are both popular choices. There are some things that all of the curating tools have in common. One of them is the ability to put a bookmarklet on your toolbar to make it easy to save the sites you want to collect. The bookmarklet is just a button that you drag to your toolbar. It shouldnโt present a problem to put them on the computers at school since you are not installing anything.ย
When you click on your bookmarklet, a window will open. Some of the information will already be populated for you. Another common feature is the ability to add โtagsโโ a word or phrase that describes the content of the site that will help you locate it again in your bookmarks. This is a good skill for students to learn, especially since it helps get them thinking in terms of keywords. This helps them become better searchers. We donโt want them typing entire questions into search enginesโ efficient searchers construct search strings using relevant keywords for better results.
One of the problems we run into with most of the curating sites is that in order to log in, you need an email address,Facebook account or Twitter account. This is problematic if youโre in a middle school or elementary school. A way around this is to create an account for your class and give the students the user name and password so they can add their bookmarks. Diigo (one of the social bookmarking sites) lets you create โdummyโ email addresses for the students so that each student can have their own log in. For class projects, I have students all contribute to a class account, but I encourage them to create their own accounts at home so they can bookmark other sites not related to the class project.
This is an example of a class account. Students tag their bookmarks with words or phrases that relate to their topic and with their first name and last initial. That way, when a student clicks on their name in the tag list, they will get a list showing just the sites that they have saved.
At some point, kids begin to โget itโ. Notice in the second paragraph of this blog post where a 7th grader notes that โDelicious really helps me and I found out that I have been helping some others that have the same artifact as me.โ This gives students a sense of what itโs like to be a curator! He has also begun to think in terms of keywords and lists some of the keywords heโs been using in his searches. Weโre making progress!
Delicious used to let you organize your bookmarks as โDelicious stacksโ that showed you a thumbnail of the site you bookmarked. This feature was popular with curators, but it โwent awayโ in the beginning of August (2012). This site, Sqworl, also offers a thumbnail of the site and allows you to add a brief description below the thumbnail. I like this, especially for younger studentsโ it will be easy for them to recognize and return to the sites they found most useful. You can drag the thumbnails around to organize them. Iโve found the developer of this site to be very responsive to requests and suggestions, too.
Whilecurating sites have similar features, each one has its own strengths. This is Symbaloo. If I was working with students to help them learn to organize the sites they were curating in a way that made sense, I might choose this tool to use. In this example, which provides students with resources on the Civil Rights movement, resources for pictures show up as green tiles (with a little camera icon on them), red tiles are video clips, and orange ones are resources with information about specific events.
This is a video created by a 7th grader showing how she uses Symbaloo as a Personal Learning Environment. Her Symbaloo account has tiles for all of the websites and resources she uses on a daily basis. While this is not exactly the same as curation, it shows how these sites can also be used to create an individual โstart page.โ
Pinterest could also be used to curate information. You can โpinโ information in many different formatsโ this example shows a video, a Google doc, websties, and blogs. While other people are pinning cupcake recipes and pictures of shoes, you (or your students) could be curating educational content!
EduClipper is a relatively new tool that is very similar to Pinterest, but designed for educational use. Itโs important to recognize that although most of the curating sites were not originally created for educational use, educators who are early adopters (people like you) will figure out ways to make them work, and will work with the siteโs developers to suggest ways to make them more education-friendly. It probably wonโt take long for the site developers to recognize that there are educational applications for the tool, and that the education market is huge. Eventually they will roll out an education version. Weโve seen this happen with Voicethread, and with Glogster, for example. So if there is a tool you like, but there are reasons that you canโt use it with your students right now, stick with it! When the education version comes along, you will already be familiar with the tool and you will be ready to adopt itโ or to defend its use to your tech people, if necessary.
Mentor Mob is another new curation tool. This one lets you develop โplaylistsโ. A playlist is a step-by-step series of articles, websites, and other content. You can go through them in the order in which they were intended to be viewed by clicking on the big NEXT button near the top of the screen, or you can use the collapsible menu (shown expanded in this screenshot on the left side of the page) to see all the steps and select the one you want to view. All of the curation tools have a search feature so you can search for a topic and see the collections curators have put together (โcuration is the new searchโ). Both Mentor Mob and EduClipper are relatively new, so there will not be that much content available yet, but it will come and you can help to build it.
There are many, many more curation tools. As you work to learn about topics, you want to get to know who the curators are that you should pay attention to. For the topic of curation, Robin Good is one of the most respected gurus. This is just a small piece of a Mindomo map he created that will link you to all kinds of curation tools, organized by content type. Take some time to explore and see if you can find the tool thatโs perfect for your purpose.