Digital Curation: Putting the Pieces Together

Inspiring others to use Web 2.0, Working With Web 2.0 Tools

Digital Curation: Putting the Pieces Together

Through digital curation we collect, manage and collate the best, most relevant content, on a specific topic or theme, for ourselves and share with others. Using tools like Scoop.it, Pinterest, Diigo and Livebinders educators collect the best resources to put them into context with organisation, annotation and presentation. This post is a summary of the…

Sue Waters

October 13, 2013

4 minutes

Through digital curation we collect, manage and collate the best, most relevant content, on a specific topic or theme, for ourselves and share with others.

Using tools like Scoop.it, Pinterest, Diigo and Livebinders educators collect the best resources to put them into context with organisation, annotation and presentation.

This post is a summary of the ideas. tips and resources shared during my presentation for the 2013 Reform Symposium e-Conference on digital curation.

Digital curation in education

It’s no longer just about creating content. We are living in an era of content abundance.

It’s now about finding and putting content into a context, in a meaningful and organised way, around specific topics.

Using tools like Scoop.it, Pinterest, Diigo and Livebinders educators collect the best resources to put them into context with organisation, annotation and presentation.

Types of tools needed

There are two types of tools needed for curation (watch Harold Rheingold’s interview with Robin Good on Curation):

News discovery tools select and aggregate the content while the curation tools are used to display your content with context with organisation, annotation and presentation. News discovery tools are all about saving time by feeding you the most relevant content.

CurationTools

There are a gazilion tools you can use.; and which tools you use, and how you curate, is a personal as the tools you use to build your personal learning network (PLN).

Digital curation is a simple as:

Find the tool(s) that you prefer to use for news discovery and for curation.
Curate the content that helps you, and is helpful for others.
Make it part of your routine to curate and share content.

You can check out examples of the different tools used by educators to curate in our Digital Curation – use in education storify or share information on how you curate by participating in our Digital curation survey.

Check out Curation: The Next Big C by John Pearce.

My Curation tools

My main curation tools are: my blogs ( The Edublogger, Edubogs Teacher Challenges, Sue Waters); Flipboard; Pinterest; Storify; and Twitter.

Flipboard

Flipboard was originally designed as a social network aggregation, magazine-format app for iPad in 2010. It is now the most popular of the magazine-like content aggrregator apps for iOS, Android, Kindle and Nook.

Flipboard’s strength is you are able to bring your social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, LinkedIn into one location alongside your favorite news sources and anything else you like to read, or watch (like YouTube) – all while making it easily to share your favorite content with your social networks and enabling you to easily curate your favorite content into Flipboard magazine(s)

Flipboard is one of my key news discovery and curation tools because:

It allows me to easily aggregrate content from a range of different sources.
Quickly curate and share articles I like directly to my own magazine from within Flipboard (or using the Flip It bookmarklet in your web browser) while also sharing the articles with with social networks at the same time!

Here’s a quick video on how I use Flipboard magazines to find, curate and share content.

You’ll find a complete step by step guide to setting up Flipboard here.

Pinterest is a pinboard-style visual booknarking website that allows users to create and manage visual content. You can share images or videos you find online, or you can upload images directly to Pinterest.

Here’s some examples of our Pinterest boards:

Examples of Class blogs – whenever I see a class blog that showcases specific aspects of blogging I take a screenshot of the blog, upload the image and pin it to the blog URL.
Helpful Blogging videos – includes videos from a range of different sources.
Curation in Education – my latest board created for this presentation.

Here’s a quick video on how to use Pinterest.

Storify

Storify allows you to curate your own stories from photos, video, tweets, what people post on social media sites and your own narration.

I use Storify as a way of pulling information shared on a topic in Twitter into one locate where I can refer back to it later. For example. I asked my Twitter network to share “Do you curate? What tools do you use? Why you curate? Why you don’t curate? Are you confused by what is digital curation?” and then pulled their answers into this Digital Curation – use in education storify.

Here’s a quick video on how to use Storify.

What are your tips?

How do you curate? What advice would you give others on curating content? Is there anything I’ve included that you want covered in more detail?

Please tell us more about how you curate by participating in our Digital curation survey

6 responses to “Digital Curation: Putting the Pieces Together”

Tony Reeves

October 14, 2013 at 4:34 pm

Thank you Sue for a most useful post which provides an excellent summary and introduction to the concept of digital curation. I have to run a digital curation session this week for new research students and I will certainly be directing them to your blog post.

Many thanks for sharing!

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Lisa Noble

October 16, 2013 at 7:15 pm

Thanks so much for this, Sue. I find that when I speak to teachers (and most recently, student teachers), this is the part of the equation many haven’t thought about. Where do I put the great stuff I’m finding, and, if they’ve thought about it, how should they share it? This is a nice resource to get people started thinking.

I’m a big fan of RebelMouse myself, and often use Pocket as an in-between stage, to help me filter what I’d like to keep and share.

My next step is the “purging” stage – how to regularly look through what I’ve curated, and see what I need to do with it.

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EdTechSandyK

October 17, 2013 at 7:39 pm

Sue, thank you for this great post and all of the resources you shared here! I have been wanting to help educators I work with learn about how they can organize all of the resources they are finding online. Your post will be of great value to me as I pull together ideas to share with them. Also you have inspired me to try Pocket again. Now, I am off to curate and share this post!

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EdTechSandyK

October 17, 2013 at 8:25 pm

Oops! I meant to say you’ve inspired me to try FLIPBOARD again. I constantly mix up Pocket & Flipboard for some reason! Argh!

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Joel Aarons

October 19, 2013 at 6:05 pm

I also use Flipboard and Pinterest. But the best by far, and what I use every day, is Pocket (formally known as Read It Later). I know Lisa mentioned it above, but let me go through it.

Ok, so if I’m flipping through my twitter from, say Flipboard, and come across an article that sounds great, but I want to read it later, I simply click on the Read It Later option. That adds it to a Pocket account that is already set up. I also have the add on loaded on my Firefox PC computer and iPad/iPhone safari app as well. Same principle. I see something I like, I press the button and it gets added to my queue.

I can read from my list, either through the Pocket iPad app which displays all my articles (with the ability to filter by tags if you like) or there is a dropdown button loaded on my PC browser (as part of the Pocket add on to Firefox) that goes through them. Once I’m finished, I click the check mark and it disappears from my queue.

I use it constantly! Highly recommended!

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Sue Waters

October 20, 2013 at 5:47 pm

Hi All

Thanks for your lovely feedback and glad that my post from the curation session has helped!

The best part of the whole process of organizing for a presentation is I also learn and it helps me reflect on my own practices. The Curation survey ( http://theedublogger.com/2013/10/11/digital-curation-survey/ ) which I hope to share soon has highlighted the extent of our preferences to which tools we use to curate and has helped me reassess some of the tools I’m not using.

This week I’ve worked on curating videos into YouTube playlists which is something I hadn’t considered doing previously http://www.youtube.com/user/edublogssupport

I’ve also been reflecting on the popularity of Diigo and Scoop.it Pros and cons of adding in more curation tools vs time and gain.

@Lisa and Joel – I’ve used Pocket but I’m finding using Flipboard magazine works well for referring back to articles. Perhaps I need to re assess?

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