Digital Curator to the Stars. I’m in the midst of a very heavy two-week travel schedule. That means I am spending many of my off hours (i.e., blogging hours) on planes, and given that I just don’t write very well on planes, it seems like a good time to point to the excellent work of other bloggers. So, I spent a bit of time sifting through the posts I have marked with a “star” in Google Reader recently, and here’s the choice collection I assembled: It seems appropriate to start with Steve Rubel’s The Digital Curator in Your Future, the post that inspired the title of this post.
Rubel argues that, in order to manage the massive amounts of information now flowing across the Web, the world needs digital curators, “people who are selfless and willing to act as sherpas and guides. They’re identifiable subject matter experts who dive through mountains of digital information and distill it down to its most relevant, essential parts.”
I think we can all probably already identify “curators” on whom we rely. Your curator, Curation: The Next Big Thing? Digital Curator Characteristics | Beyond Instructional Design. I’m still in the midst of a lot of travel, so I had planned on following a path similar to my last posting on the Digital Curator, etc. and pointing to interesting things that other bloggers are doing. As it happens, though, that post and number of others out there are beginning to form into a nice “thought cloud” across the blogosphere that I would write about regardless of my travel schedule. Over at The Bamboo Project, Michele Martin has woven together Steve Rubel, Tony Karrer, thoughts from some of my recent posts, and of course, her own great thinking to ask whether we should view Instructional Designers and Trainers as Digital Curators?
As Michele puts it: …it’s crystallizing for me how much of a need there is in the professional development and learning sphere for digital curation and re-purposing. Well, elsewhere in the blogosphere a vibrant debate is under way about the role of instructional design and Who Gets to be Called an Instructional Designer. Jeff Cobb. Digital curators for organisational knowledge banks | thelearningcrowd.
Like many organisations, the Civil Service is using wiki’s to help capture and share knowledge and best practice. There is a lot of good information in these “knowledge banks”. However, they tend to have a low profile and, in the daily press of events, they are easily forgotten. Updates are ad-hoc and the overall structure can become too complex to easily use. Reading Erin Scime’s post on Content Strategist as Digital Curator, has spurred me to see if I can recruit Digital Curators for one of these wiki’s which is dedicated to specialist communications knowledge, the GCN KnowledgeBank.
As Erin says: In galleries and museums, curators use judgment and a refined sense of style to select and arrange art to create a narrative, evoke a response, and communicate a message. For a knowledge bank wiki, Digital curators would be stewards for a specific topic, say, press campaigns or communications strategy. This is all about responsible collection management. Like this: Like Loading... Who are your curators? | Content curator | Digital Curator. I had already planned to write a post about “curators” today when I noticed that Jeff De Cagna has posted about the “content challenge” over on SmartBlog.
He sees “content curation” as one of the most significant innovation opportunities available to organizations. We’re in agreement on that and have spoken together about it before. Here on Mission to Learn, though, I’d like to focus on it as one of the most significant innovation opportunities for individual lifelong learners. First things first: What is a Curator? The idea behind curators and content curation is that there is such a flood of new content pouring through the Internet pipes these days that being aware of all of it and sorting it out in meaningful ways is simply not possible. Bottom line: A curator is an individual or organization who excels at helping others make sense.
For the individual lifelong learner, I see (at least) two powerful opportunities here. The first is to find great curators. The second is to be a curator. Curating knowledge: Why structured learning succeeds. Parent Category: Learning Created on Friday, 19 August 2011 14:01 Published Date The advent of the internet heralded the “information age”, a time when vast quantities of human knowledge were available to anyone with a computer and internet connection. For education, the potential seemed endless: anybody could read and publish anything, meaning that anybody could teach and be taught. However, access did not equal utility. The sheer amount of information made it difficult to find anything that was accurate, relevant or high quality.
Accessing the web soon became a matter of information overload. People who are unfamiliar with a topic have no reliable way to assess the quality and correctness of information on it. They must rely on trusted experts. This vital step lends meaning to the unshaped mass of data and makes it truly useful. Curators can gather knowledge on any topic – from particle physics to the latest sitcoms – and the web provides many tools to accomplish this. 1. 2. 3. 4.
Thoughts on Curation. News or knowledge curator? | I’ve been reading a bit about how news organizations are having to define the role of editor in the 21st century, i.e. Editor 2.0. This is a significant shift – one that we in education need to take note of! It’s important because it goes beyond plugging in some web 2.0 tools, like blogging. If the world is awash with information, is being filled with blogs and other media that help keep people informed, and is being enveloped by online social networking as the community ‘glue’ that binds people together (admitedly we are now not talking about the average educator) then newspapers needed to do more than just go online (which all significant papers have done) , and then add some widgets and gadgets. Having worked as a ‘subbie’ for the Medical Journal of Australia many moons ago, I can only begin to gasp at the changes taking place in media reporting.
Imagine being a ‘search’ or ‘tag’ editor! Scott Harp gives a good run-down of The Editor as Curator of ALL the news on the web. Content Curation. Isn't "content curator" just another term for "reporter"? A few recent posts in the association blogosphere have the idea of "content curation" on my mind. I love this idea, but the term also bugs me a bit. Before I explain why, let's get up to speed: What is content curation? It takes the idea of a museum curator and applies it to the modern-day stream of information. There's too much info in the world, both in real life and online, for a normal person to sort through. A curator expertly sorts through it all and delivers the most valuable, useful info. Two weeks ago, Jeff De Cagna wrote on SmartBlog Insights that content curation is "[o]ne of the most significant innovation opportunities for associations. " I wholeheartedly agree that content curation can and should be a central role for associations.
With that said, please don't be intimated or confused by the term "content curator. " I'm not looking to get into another argument over semantics here, though. Chances are, your association is doing it already, in some form.