Digital Curation in Education

In recent months, we have witnessed the success of books and articles predicting massive shifts in the way students will experience and complete post-secondary education. Costs will be reduced and outcomes improved, writers argue, when higher ed is unbundled, meaning students pick and choose from a

Instructors are experimenting with the Flipboard news reader to present up-to-date course materials in a magazine-format mobile app.

Participate Learning, formerly called appoLearning, has launched Collections, a new curation and collaboration tool for educators.

Participate Learning's Collections feature lets teachers create a digital folder of online educational resources, such as Web sites, apps and videos, and organize them according to subject, unit, lesson, topic or other organizational criteria. They can even add their own files from Dropbox, Google Drive or other cloud storage services. Any resource with a Web address can be added to a collection.

Teachers can then share their collections with colleagues and invite them to discuss items in real time. They also have the option of building collaborative collections on topics of shared interest.

We’ve been asked "how ethical is content curation?" so many times we decided to dig deep to give you a data answer: ethical content curation exists.

Content Curators as Cultural Intermediaries: “My reputation as a curator is based on what I curate, right?”

In 2011 The Economist alerted us to the claim that “digital data will flood the planet.” The exponential increase in data such as e-mails, Tweets and Instagram pictures underpins claims that we are living in an age of ‘infoglut’ (Andrejevic) and information superabundance (Internet Live Stats). Several years earlier, Shirky posed this as an issue not of “information overload” but of “filter failure” (Asay). Shirky’s claim suggests that we should not despair in the face of unmanageable volumes of content, but develop ways to make sense of this information – to curate.

Reflecting on his experiences of curating the Meltdown Festival, David Byrne addressed the emergence of everyday curating practices: “Nowadays, everything and everyone can be curated. There are curators of socks, menus and dirt bike trails […] Anyone who has come up with a top-ten list is, in effect, a curator. And anyone who clicks ‘Like’ is a curator.”

Abstract

A canyonesque gulf has long existed between open academia and many external subject communities. Since 2011, we have been developing and piloting the public open scholar role (Coughlan and Perryman 2012) - involving open academics discovering, sharing and discussing open educational resources (OER) with online communities outside formal education in order to help bridge this gulf. In 2013 we took the public open scholar into Facebook (Perryman and Coughlan, 2013) to reach an international audience of autism-focussed Facebook groups in India, Africa and Malaysia, with a combined membership of over 5000 people.

Performing the public open scholar role within Facebook led to our learning from group members about new resources produced by subject communities outside formal education, for example by voluntary sector organisations, government and professional bodies. These resources are surprisingly numerous and compare favourably with those from universities. Seeking to source more such resources we conducted a systematic large-scale search of free online courses, recording not only the number of learning materials available, but also how easy it was to find them.

We found that provision from formal education, especially universities, dominates the returned results when searching for free online courses. Consequently, resources from beyond formal education, while they exist, are difficult to find. Indeed, most aggregators and repositories proudly state that the free online courses they list are from 'Top Universities', appearing oblivious to provision from external subject communities. We extended our research to cover e-textbooks and found a similar situation, with content from formal education again dominating provision.

On the basis of these findings we suggest that the prominence of university-provided content within search aggregators not only marginalises externally produced resources, relegating them to even more obscurity than has been the case thus far, but also marginalises the open educational practices that were involved in the production of these resources. We propose that the OER movement’s questions about ways of involving end-users as co-producers may be answered by looking to external subject communities and, accordingly, we should be supporting and learning from these communities. In addition, there is a need for further research into the open educational practices of external subject communities, who are clearly more than just passive consumers of resources and are involved in both producing and adapting OER.

Our research has also led to our further developing the public open scholar role to include online content curation as a part of the process, on the basis of evidence indicating that online curation has the potential to help increase the discoverability of resources and raise awareness of open educational practices from beyond academia. In particular, we suggest that ‘social curation’ (Seitzinger, 2014) - which foregrounds sharing curated collections as a component of the curation process - has a key role in this regard. We also suggest that further research in this area could be beneficial, for example in exploring the potential for librarians to become involved in curating OER from outside academia.
DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/jime.ab

Last month, The Atlantic published a lengthy article about information that is lost on the web. That story itself is in jeopardy.

Abstract

In today’s hypermedia landscape, youth and young adults are increasingly using social media platforms, online aggregators and mobile applications for daily information use. Communication educators, armed with a host of free, easy-to-use online tools, have the ability to create dynamic approaches to teaching and learning about information and communication flow online. In this paper we explore the concept of curation as a student- and creation-driven pedagogical tool to enhance digital and media literacy education. We present a theoretical justification for curation and present six key ways that curation can be used to teach about critical thinking, analysis and expression online. We utilize a case study of the digital curation platform Storify to explore how curation works in the classroom, and present a framework that integrates curation pedagogy into core media literacy education learning outcomes.
DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/2013-02