Content Curation World

If you are curating content, whether for the purpose of personal learning, or for creating a useful public information resource, your very first objective should be how can you add value to the existing information that you are going to work on.

Harold Jarche, does a wonderful job of explaining in simple terms what's the difference between sharing on social media, reposting or making your bookmarks public, versus the actual vetting and selection of each individual content item in light of the context and objective for which it is being curated.

The cherry on the pie from the author is an invaluable synthesis and bringing together of related items from Ross Dawson, Maria Popova and me, that allows you to scan and see at a glance 14 different ways in which you can truly add value to whichever set of information bits you are dealing with.

A great reference for anyone looking to improve the quality and value of its own curated work.

Useful. Inspiring. 8/10

Full article: http://socialmediatoday.com/hjarche/1964106/ask-what-value-you-can-add 

Harold Jarche has a good post about curation and PKM on his blog. Nonetheless is from a year back or more, it is definitely worth a read.

The short relatively post has been inspired by a somewhat misleading tweet by Cristina Milos (where she says that "curating is different than aggregating and that's why she is not a fan of Scoop.it pr Paper.li).

The tweet is misleading because, while Paper.li is indeed an aggregator for most, Scoop.it does not automate the process of selecting and publishing a curated magazine, though, I must admit, plenty of its top viewed channels do not go much beyond what Paper.li does, basically reposting other people content "as is". So I definitely sympathize with this issue.

And the key point Harold Jarche wants to make, is that, anytime there is some kind of human intervention to pick, select, re-title, contextualize or introduce some information, then, we are actually "curating" something. Not so, when we strive to automate, simplify and abbreviate the time needed to produce some valuable info.

He writes (read the word "PKM" as if it said "curation"): "...sense-making, or placing information into context, is where the real personal value of PKM lies. 

The process of seeking out information sources, making sense of them through some actions, and then sharing with others to confirm or accelerate our knowledge are interlinked activities from which knowledge (often slowly) emerges.

...The act of writing a blog post, a tweet, or an annotation on a social bookmark all force you to think a bit more than clicking once and filing it to an automated system. Other sense-making routines, like a weekly review of Twitter favourites and creating Friday’s Finds, encourages reflection and reinforces learning.

Automating sense-making is antithetical to the rationale behind PKM."

Rightful. Insightful. Useful. 8/10

Full post: http://www.jarche.com/2012/03/the-pkm-value-add/

According to Harold Jarche, knowledge is an emergent property of all sense-making activities.

Curation and PKM (personal knowledge management) have the same objective: helping oneself and others gain more understanding about whatever we are interested in. The only difference between the two is that curation devotes itself to satisfy the knowledge needs of an audience while the second addresses these at a personal level.

But what are sense-making activites about?

Harold Jarche draws on Ross Dawson's five ways of adding value to information as well as on Nancy Dixon examination Rob Cross and Lee Sproull examination of tacit knowledge sharing practices inside large organizations to identify at least eight individual approaches to sense-making or adding more value to existing information.

These include:

1. Validating
2. Synthesizing
3. Presenting
4. Customizing
   
   
5.  Answering
6. Meta-informing
7. Reformulating
8. Legitimizing
   
   
   to which I would personally add:
    
9. Comparing
10. Finding related items
11. Illustrating - Visualizing
12. Evaluating
13. Crediting and attributing

It is indeed around identifying and becoming aware of these specific aspects of our sense-making activities that we can improve and augment our capability to learn and to effectively curate information for others.

Thoughtful. Inspiring. 8/10

Original post: http://www.jarche.com/2013/10/pushing-and-pulling-tacit-knowledge/