*Curation Situations: Let us count the ways Curation is a funny word. When my colleagues and I wrote our Social Media Curation Library Technology Report for ALA, we struggled with a definition. The folks we interviewed across library land curated in several different ways and we used the term curation differently depending on current community needs or where they were in any particular project. Back in 2014, our interviews and surveys led us to a taxonomy of digital curation. K12 digital curation is about getting our users/students/teachers to the good stuff, pointing them to content and resources they might not themselves discover with their own intuitive strategies. Curation allows us to scale our practice and reach our community 24/7 at their points of need. Social media curation efforts can help us fuel participatory culture as we build and connect communities. Curating with kids As students curate, they make decisions about authority and bias. Curating OER Beyond the basketball metaphor . . .
The Public Domain Review click 2x From Circe to Clinton: why powerful women are cast as witches | Books During the 2016 US presidential election, American social media was flooded with images of Hillary Clinton wearing a black hat and riding a broom, or else cackling with green skin. Her opponents named her The Wicked Witch of the Left, claimed they had sources testifying that she smelled of sulphur, and took particular delight in depictions of her being melted. Given that the last witch trial in the US was more than 100 hundred years ago, what are we to make of this? In the late 19th century, the suffragette Matilda Joslyn Gage asserted something revolutionary. Obviously, she was on to something. A better parallel to “witch” is the word “whore”. Yet, despite all the attempts to stamp out witches, they are as strongly with us as ever, from Wanda Maximoff, the Scarlet Witch in the Avengers movies, to the recent film The Love Witch, to the television series American Horror Story, to non-fiction books such as Stacy Schiff’s The Witches: Salem, 1692. And ugliness, of course, is key.
Email Marketing, Content Marketing and Content Curation Tool How Important is it to Love Your Job? Much has been touted about how important it is to find a job you love. Maybe that's not as critical as we've been led to believe. (Reading time 150 seconds) My experience is that most people don't love their work. Does that mean that everyone else is left to live in frustration, desperately seeking that perfect job they can be passionate about? You can and should find enjoyment in your work. It is critical to distinguish between the job and the way you do it. Let me give you a personal example. Although my specific job literally made me sick, I was proud and took satisfaction in the way I was doing the job. Why did I put such a concentrated effort into a job that I clearly didn't love? Passionate about the job…no. So if your boss doesn't appreciate you, you're underpaid, your company isn't ideal…that can be OK, for now. Be able to pat yourself on the back at the end of every day. Afraid of being stuck in the same job for life? So, paraphrasing a verse Stephen Stills penned,
Tool literacy as a new process I’ve been thinking a bit about the notion of app smashing and the way we introduce learning challenges in our classrooms and libraries. And I am thinking there’s a thinking process going on that we’re not thinking about nearly enough. The Evolution of the Desk by Best Reviews Introducing a tool and saying you are going to use this tool to tell this story is kinda like saying go to page 347 and do exercises three through five. The notion of app smashing was coined by Greg Kulowiec (@gregkulowiec) of EdTechTeacher Loosely, it’s the process of using multiple applications together in order to to complete complex tasks or projects. I think the word process is important. We need to learn how to leverage the tools on our new desks. Affordances are the possible ways a tools could be used by an individual in a particular context. I’ve been engaging in a bit of metaphorical thinking around tool literacy: It’s a bit like building a piña colada out of Jelly Belly jelly beans.
Richest 1% on target to own two-thirds of all wealth by 2030 | Business The world’s richest 1% are on course to control as much as two-thirds of the world’s wealth by 2030, according to a shocking analysis that has lead to a cross-party call for action. World leaders are being warned that the continued accumulation of wealth at the top will fuel growing distrust and anger over the coming decade unless action is taken to restore the balance. An alarming projection produced by the House of Commons library suggests that if trends seen since the 2008 financial crash were to continue, then the top 1% will hold 64% of the world’s wealth by 2030. Even taking the financial crash into account, and measuring their assets over a longer period, they would still hold more than half of all wealth. Since 2008, the wealth of the richest 1% has been growing at an average of 6% a year – much faster than the 3% growth in wealth of the remaining 99% of the world’s population.
Portugal’s Example: What Happened After It Decriminalized All Drugs, From Weed to Heroin As diplomats gather at the United Nations in New York this week to consider the future of global drug policy, one Portuguese official, João Goulão, will likely command attention that far outstrips his country's influence in practically any other area. That's because 16 years ago, Portugal took a leap and decriminalized the possession of all drugs — everything from marijuana to heroin. By most measures, the move has paid off. Today, Portuguese authorities don't arrest anyone found holding what's considered less than a 10-day supply of an illicit drug — a gram of heroin, ecstasy, or amphetamine, two grams of cocaine, or 25 grams of cannabis. Instead, drug offenders receive a citation and are ordered to appear before so- called "dissuasion panels" made up of legal, social, and psychological experts. Most cases are simply suspended. "Now things have changed completely," he went on. 'It was the combination of the law and these services that made it a success.
Supercharge students' digital literacy skills with content curation While simple collecting is additive, curation is subtractive — what is left out is almost more important than what is included. A great way to think about collection and curation is described by Frank Chimero (2011). Consider collection as a bowl of loose pearls, and curation as a pearl necklace. An information and digital literacy meta-skill Challenging students to create a high-quality curated collection assumes that they possess a wide range of information and digital literacy skills. These steps encourage students to develop and apply many different information and digital literacy strategies. Finding the information Creating a curated collection of high-quality information requires more than a simple Google search. Expert search strategies, including the use of keywords, advanced search operators and Boolean logic, are key tools in the curator’s arsenal. Selecting what to include Editorialising or annotating the collection Creating and publishing the collection
Attention hacking is the epidemic of our generation… Variable rewards … also know as “The virtual slot machine” In 1930, B.F. Skinner, a psychologist at Harvard University placed a rat inside a box. The box had a lever that would, once pressed, make some food drop. Skinner deduced that this type of environmental conditioning could be applied to anyone, including humans. Now here comes the interesting part: in further experiments, B.F. Have you ever mechanically opened Facebook just to check if you have new notifications? Casinos know that very well and have massively expanded the space dedicated to slot machines, which are nothing but variable rewards dispensers. “Every consumer interface is becoming like a slot machine: it’s about looping people into these flows of incentive and reward.” — Natasha Dow Schüll, Cultural Anthropologist at NYU Allowing users to choose the frequency of notifications is a fairly easy feature to implement: why can’t we ask Instagram to show us new notifications only once per day? Choice determination
HyperDocs and the teacher librarian The concept of HyperDocs is spreading all over edtech land. HyperDocs are perfect opportunities to grow teacher librarian/ classroom teacher partnerships. A true extension of what TLs do or should be doing in a hyperlinked information landscape, HyperDocs are all about curation and collaboration, instruction based on engaged inquiry, as well as our mission to inspire learning communities to think, create, share and grow. While it’s quite possible you’ve been building HyperDocs-like instruction for years on a variety of platforms, we can now connect our work to an accepted model and a growing and generous community! What are HyperDocs? According to the HyperDocs site, HyperDocs, a transformative, interactive Google Doc replacing the worksheet method of delivering instruction, is the ultimate change agent in the blended learning classroom. I recently interviewed the three teachers behind the HyperDocs model. Lisa Highfill, Kelly Hilton and Sarah Landis ask the simple, but provocative question:
Online mattress-in-a-box brands: Why are there so many? Since Casper launched its “mattress in a box” concept in 2014, digital-savvy entrepreneurs have been launching new mattress brands online seemingly every week. Each offers a state-of-the-art mattress made with patented new materials or an innovative design, all compressed into a small box for easy shipping right to your doorstep. A Layla mattress is two-sided, giving you the choice between a firm or soft mattress. It’s hard to know just how many online mattress-in-a-box companies are floating around, but one such company’s CEO said the number could be as high as 150. Ideally, a mattress is something you buy once every eight to 10 years, when an old one wears out or a major life event like getting married creates a new household. “Since you have all these mattress manufacturers anyway, if you can find a manufacturer that will manufacturer the mattresses on a private label and slap your brand on, then you’re in business,” said Daniel Galle, cofounder of Nolah Sleep.
The Heroes of America's Startup Economy Weren't Born in America According to the Entrepreneurship Rate indicator of the Inc. Entrepreneurship Index, Inc.'s proprietary benchmarked score representing the health of American startups, the percentage of entrepreneurs who are immigrants is currently close to a 20-year high. Today, they are a large reason the Inc. Entrepreneurship Index has remained relatively stable at 87 out of 100 in the first quarter of 2018, down almost imperceptibly from 88 out of 100 in the quarter prior. The most prolific startup markets in the country are flush with foreign-born founders Percentage of immigrant entrepreneurs among U.S. metro areas While the overall 20- to 35-year-old U.S. population lacks the desire their parents had to start a business for themselves, immigrant entrepreneurs of all ages are taking advantage of healthy access to capital and forging on through remarkably tight labor conditions. A composite index scored by the benchmark method, the Inc. As you would expect, the NVCA isn't pleased. Canada's Gain