Digital Curation in Education

Robin Good: If you are looking for a content curation, mindmapping and presentation tool rolled into one, I strongly suggest you give a good road test to Mindomo.

I have been a passionate fan of mindmaps since 2007, and have created tons of them to curate my many collection of "best tools" in specific niches or learning maps on dedicated topics. You can see some of them here: http://www.mindmeister.com/users/channel/RobinGood

But with time, and the increased size of my collections, I have been searching for valid alternatives which provided greater speed, better ways to display and view the mapped info and more options to extract value from my collections.

Mindomo, which I have been heavy-testing for the last six-months, is my new reference tool not just for mindmapping but for a) curating large collections of information into a navigable cohesive whole, b) creating prezi-like presentations without needing to become an engineer.

Specifically, Mindomo integrates lots of unique and very valuable features to the basic mindmapping toolset, including:

- Capture content via browser bookmarklet

- Navigate and zoom in-out easily

- Search and embed video clips
- Search and embed images

- Search and embed audio clips

- Automatically credit all media sources utilized

- Customize look of maps in many ways

- Create presentations from your mindmaps

- Import and export to different formats + embed

- Works and syncs on iPad and Android

- Collaborative editing

- Cross-platform offline desktop app

- Custom URLs for your mindmaps

- just to name a few.

Here's a good example of what I have been able to "curate" with Mindomo:

1) http://bit.ly/ContentCurationUniverse

a very large collection of content curation tools

2) www.mindomo.com/mindmap/content-curation-for-education-98ccaad217074a07b9bff8b76effab8e ;

a navigable "presentation-map"

MindMeister and other mindmapping tools still provide good value, but in my humble opinion Mindomo, with its own limits and idiosyncracies, has earned my trust as being the most effective, powerful and feature-rich visual curation tool.

Give it a try and let me know what you think.

Pricing plans: http://www.mindomo.com/pricing.htm

Find out more: http://www.mindomo.com/

Robin Good: StoryCrawler is an upcoming news and content curation platform which allows you to easily track an unlimited number of topics / keywords and to curate selected ones for publication, both on the web, via RSS feed or email.

Selected news stories can be, tagged, categorized and fully edited in each and every aspect before being published.

Inside the Storycrawler backend, a curator can configure and save an unlimited number of persistent searches monitoring online mentions of events, people, brands inside specific types of content sources (e.g.: social media, news, blogs, etc.).

Storycrawler makes your curated news stream available as a RSS feed, as an embeddable javaScript or iFrame code snippet, besides publishing your content directly on your account pages and providing direct sharing options for Facebook and Twitter.

From my own limited experience in testing an "unofficial" early Beta version of Storycrawler, it looks like the basics features are all in place while the UI, usability and final output formatting options still having some work to do.

P.S.: The platform seems to be targeted at medium to large size, enterprise companies and does not provide for now indications of its pricing plans. You can contact a StoryCrawler representative here: http://www.storycrawler.com/contact/

Promising.

Find out more: http://www.storycrawler.com/ ;