Curate your personal learning environment

Robin Good: Must-read article on ClutterMuseum.com by Leslie M-B, exploring in depth the opportunity to have students master their selected topics by "curating" them, rather than by reading and memorizing facts about them.

"Critical and creative thinking should be prioritized over remembering content"

"That students should learn to think for themselves may seem like a no-brainer to many readers, but if you look at the textbook packages put out by publishers, you’ll find that the texts and accompanying materials (for both teachers and students) assume students are expected to read and retain content—and then be tested on it.

Instead, between middle school (if not earlier) and college graduation, students should practice—if not master—how to question, critique, research, and construct an argument like an historian."

This is indeed the critical point. Moving education from an effort to memorize things on which then to be tested, to a collaborative exercise in creating new knowledge and value by pulling and editing together individual pieces of content, resources and tools that allow the explanation/illustration of a topic from a specific viewpoint/for a specific need.

And I can't avoid to rejoice and second her next proposition: "What if we shifted the standards’ primary emphasis from content, and not to just the development of traditional skills—basic knowledge recall, document interpretation, research, and essay-writing—but to the cultivation of skills that challenge students to make unconventional connections, skills that are essential for thriving in the 21st century?"

What are these skills, you may ask. Here is a good reference where to look them up: http://www.p21.org/storage/documents/P21_Framework_Definitions.pdf (put together by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills)

Recommended. Good stuff. 9/10

Full article: www.cluttermuseum.com/make-students-curators/

(Image credit: Behance.net)

Robin Good: What does curation mean from an educational viewpoint? And what is the key difference between "collecting" and "curating".

Nancy White (@NancyW), a 21st Century Learning & Innovation Specialist and the author of Innovations in Education blog, has written an excellent article, dissecting the key characterizing traits of curation, as a valuable resource to create and share knowledge. 

She truly distills some key traits of curation in a way that is clear and comprehensible to anyone.

She writes: "The first thing I realized is that in order to have value-added benefits to curating information, the collector needs to move beyond just classifying the objects under a certain theme to deeper thinking through a) synthesis and b) evaluation of the collected items.

How are they connected?"

Excellent definition. 

And then she also frames perfectly the relevance of "context" for any meaningful curation project by writing: "I believe when we curate, organization moves beyond thematic to contextual – as we start to build knowledge and understanding with each new resource that we curate.

Themes have a common unifying element – but don’t necessarily explain the “why.”

Theme supports a central idea – Context allows the learner to determine why that idea (or in this case, resource) is important.

So, as collecting progresses into curating, context becomes essential to determine what to keep, and what to discard."

But there's a lot more insight distilled in this article as Nancy captures with elegance the difference between collecting for a personal interest and curating for a specific audience. 

She finally steals my full endorsement for this article by discretely inquirying how great a value it would be to allow students to "curate" the domains of interest they need to master.

Excellent. Highly recommended. 9/10

Full article: http://d20innovation.d20blogs.org/2012/07/07/understanding-content-curation/ ;

A study in 1985 “On the Brain of a Scientist: Albert Einstein” found that Einstein’s brain was actually not significantly different from others. As an Organization Development blogger put it:

                     ===> what made Einstein different was his mind. <===

His thinking and passion for learning were the basis of his genius. His brain was the same, but his intellect was markedly different. He was often humble about his intellect, and instead said that learning relied on working hard and imagining the impossible. So what made his learning so different? What can we learn from Einstein?

Read more, very interesting, a MUST:

http://newsroom.opencolleges.edu.au/features/how-to-ignite-passion-in-your-students-8-ways-educators-can-foster-passion-based-learning/

"While both can lead consumers on a unexpected journey, chasing the white rabbit into previously unexplored corners of the web, [a Curator] actually helps sift through the media abyss, singling out worthwhile information, and often “adding value” by lending context through their own ideas and opinions. The former are rebloggers."

Great pick by Robin Good where writer Chris DeLine goes through the recent attacks on Tumblr to actually paint an interesting picture of Curation as something "not entirely different than Creation."

Reading this article took me back to when we started Scoop.it. Back then, we felt the need - in spite of Tumblr's already growing success back then - for a platform dedicated to Curation. While some questioned the opportunity, this post and the growing success not just of Scoop.it but other curation services are a great sign of the legitimacy of that need.

Interestingly as well, it's fascinating to me to see that post curated with one angle by Robin, with another angle by Jan and then by me with a different twist again. This is typical of this idea that Curation is some form of creation: by enabling expression. I would not have picked up Drake's opening comment nor would I have thought about writing about it but I can more easily express some thought on a piece of already-existing content. Hopefully adding context for a particular audience which - with great satisfaction - we see Scoop.it users develop a lot more (and in a better way) than - says DeLine - "rebloggers, basking in all the beautiful projections on their Tumblr sites and Pinterest pages, hoping that someone (anyone!) stumbles across them and sees the collection as a reflection of themselves."

(Image credit: Shutterstock)

Robin Good: Good article by Rex Hammock on RexBlog.com highlighting the confusion arising from using the term curation when it is not really appropriate. 

He writes: "Somewhere along the way, the inherently-confusing metaphor of curation being applied to content on the web went from something like, finding relevant content and pointing readers to it to something like, find content on other sites and simply re-write what they say and place it on our site and that’s okay, as long as somewhere you credit the source.”

He has several more interesting points. here a few key excerpts from it: "While I believe “curation media” can be a helpful service to readers, the act of writing a story that rehashes another story — without adding some insight or background — is a disservice to all involved.

...

"...I’m not suggesting that the act of sharing articles you run across is anything but good. I’m not even suggesting that websites like Huffington Post or Business Insider are nothing more than re-writing services. (I’m not “suggesting” it, as it’s well known.)

This is the bottom line: To be of any value (or to prevent you from appearing foolish), your curation needs to be more than merely re-writing something that has already been re-written one or two times.

If you feel the need to do that, just link."

Rightful. 7/10

Full article: http://www.rexblog.com/2012/06/14/47898 ;

****** Like Robin I give this 7 out of 10. Ther are some curators such as Robin I rarely add much content to because they are expressing my thoughts in some cases better than me. Part of good curating is to select and share, or just select. I just posted a great Infographic by MaxOz (how the world spends its time online) because it fit something I believe or am interested in. In Such a case a rare straight scoop is fine.

Mostly I am way to talkative and full of beans to not weigh in (lol). As far as the "rewriting" goes I agree with Robin, not adding anything and calling it yours doesn't make it so. If someone were to paraphrase my writing, call it their curation and then give credit they insult me. Like shooting me and then apologizing - the one doesn't compensate for the other :).

Marty

PS. See my Scoop of Robin's DisplayNote review on Startup Revolution for Part II of this conversation about curation.