Content Curation World

Robin Good: Cloudscapes are collections of "clouds" about a certain topic. A "cloud" can be anything of relevance to learning and teaching clike an essay, a presentation, a resource, tool or event.

A cloudscape is therefore a user-driven collection of learning materials/resources pulled together for a specific need.

A cloudscape contains multiple elements:

1) Content - the actual text content

2) Cloudstream - tracking all the editing activities in the collection

3) Clouds - individual information objects

4) related Tweets

5) an RSS feed

6) a discussion area

Cloudworks, the platform where cloudscapes are born, is an open repository of educational and learning materials that motivates participants to share, find and discuss learning and teaching ideas.

Although the word "curation" is never used on the site or in the related documentation, this is yet another example of how the convergence of open repositories, open content and sharing platforms like this one, provide a natural and fertile ground for spontaneous curation approaches.

On this platform users can create topical learning collections by bringing together a selected set of existing content resources.

Cloudworks is developed by the Institute of Educational Technology at The Open University in the UK and it is part of the Open University Learning Design Initiative (OULDI) project.

Example of a cloudscape: http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloudscape/view/2035

More info: http://cloudworks.ac.uk/

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