Robin Good: Here is a good example of video curation at work. CoFounder.tv is a video web site curating only the best and most inspiring entrepreneurship video clips. From startuppers, to investors and VCs, the growing collection strives to bring together a variety of viewpoints from those who have been there.
The curated video site is maintained by Rony El-Nashar, a VC at Dubai based SeedStartup, a startup accelerator and seed venture fund that invests in early-stage startups from all around the world.
He writes: "My goal with Cofounder TV is to build a resource that educates and inspires entrepreneurs globally."
Right on track. A pioneering example of what you are going to see in place of blogs soon. 9/10
Robin Good: The Contextual Thesaurus is a working experiment of Microsoft Language Labs, which visualizes alternative ways of expressing the same idea both as text phrases as well as visual map made up of all the possible alternative combinations.
The Contextual Thesaurus is an English-to-English machine translation system that employs the same architecture that the Microsoft Translator uses when translating different languages.
While an ordinary thesaurus provides synonyms and near synonyms, usually only for single words, often without offering much information about when to use these terms, the Contextual Thesaurus provides multiple full-phrase alternatives.
How to use it: Type a short phrase into the input box. Then click the Submit button (the arrowhead in an orange circle) or hit the Enter key on your keyboard. The system accepts only one sentence at a time.
Some suggestions: Limit your input to 4-8 words. Even two or three words will sometimes be enough to retrieve a useful set of equivalents.Formal language works better than colloquial language.
Click one of the paraphrases to highlight the path through the graph taken by that sentence. If you click on a word in the graph, the top-ranked paraphrase containing that term will be highlighted. If you click the check mark beside a paraphrase, the text will be moved into the input box in order to be paraphrased. This way you can round trip your paraphrases to see more alternatives.
What is this good for? Among many other things: Writing assistance, document simplification, document style adaptation, in-house style enforcement, summarizing and abstracting, question answering, conversational agents, interaction with game characters, search and information extraction and retrieval.
P.S.: API coming It makes a lot of grammatical errors.
Robin Good: Data (or Digital) Curation, is an academic/scientific discipline dedicated to preserve, organize and collect digital documents and other electronic artifacts for archival, re-use and repurposing objectives.
The importance of Data Curation can be easily underestimated as it may appear, to the casual viewer, as an arid, tedious document archival job.
In reality, Digital Curation efforts are of great value to the preservation of important cultural documents and data for future researchers who will want to access, in some organized way, the data-information-artifacts of our time. In addition, the data curation practices and guidelines developed by academic and research institutions can also be of value and inspiration to other types of curation work, that may adopt, emulate or innovate upon them.
If you are interested in learning more about Data/Digital Curation and in identifying the key organizations in this space, here is a good shortlist for you, thanks to the kind work of Kevin "the Librarian" Read:
Robin Good: Short post but very relevant points to start looking at. @chopemurray at Opencollaborarchy is the first individual I see catching the different shades of curation "intent" that are characterizing the "surge" of content curation initiatives, projects and tools all around us.
From the original post: "However the evolution of digital curation is experiencing some fragmentation. Not that this is bad, but it does suggest the differences should be understood as curation tools will differ in features and capabilities as each tries to satisfy its target customer base.
So far I have identified 3 major distinctions in [what is "sold" today as] curation:
a) Content Distribution
Marketing Content: comes in several forms as marketeers move away from landing pages on Facebook and web sites, and seek to amplify brand presence through curated content.
b) Sense-making - Topic-focused
Information (or Knowledge Content): More focused on collecting and condensing information to support a topic or subject. Most commonly a reference site usually set up for either internal or external collaboration
c) Personal Expression
Curating Personal Content – less dependent on content management features and capabilites: can either be used for amplification (self-branding) or condensing (information)."
Rightful. Calls for deeper analysis. 8/10
P.S.: I invite you also to contribute to the poll provided at the end of the post. Notwithstanding that the poll will reflect only the opinions of those answering it, I'd very much like those few investing in curation as a sense-making activity to make their voices heard.
Robin Good: NewsWhip is a news discovery service that specializes in bringing you only the fastest spreading news stories on Facebook and Twitter.
The news are organized by main geographical areas and by broad key topics, from which you can select your preferred ones.
From the official site: "NewsWhip's technology tracks all the news published by about 5,000 English-language sources –about 60,000 news stories each day. It gathers social data for each story – how many shares, likes, tweets and comments it has – at repeated intervals, building a live picture of how popular it is, right now. With this information, it calculates a social speed at which each story is travelling. The process is unique, new, and patent pending."
My comments: If you are looking to pick up "trendy" stories across the board or on specific general interest areas NewsWhip may be a great companion. Disappointing if you are looking for quality, in-depth stories in specific niche areas.
Also of interest two tools the company is offering to web publishers:
1) Spike - makes it easy to catch stries that are starting to trend
2) Social Amplifier - exposes your most valuable articles by leveraging your readers preferences via Facebook and Twitter
Robin Good: Databib is a collaborative, annotated "bibliography of primary research data repositories" which allows anyone to easily find, access and download records from open research data repositories.
"Users and bibliographers create and curate records that describe data repositories that users can search."
Databib has been developed with support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
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?"
We often ask our students to create annotated bibliographies, and this focuses on their capacity to evaluate and make decisions about the validity, reliability and relevance of sources they have found. using Scoop.it, we can ask them to do much the same thing, but they will publish their ideas for an audience, and will also be able to provide and use peer feedback to enhance and tighten up their thinking. This is relevant to any curriculum area. Of course it is dependent on schools being able to access any social media, but rather than thinking about what is impossible, perhaps we could start thinking about what is possible and lobbying for change.
We often ask our students to create annotated bibliographies, and this focuses on their capacity to evaluate and make decisions about the validity, reliability and relevance of sources they have found. Using Scoop.it, we can ask them to do much the same thing. But they will publish their ideas for an audience, and will also be able to provide and use peer feedback to enhance and tighten up their thinking. This is relevant to any age, and any curriculum area. Of course it is dependent on schools being able to access social media. But rather than thinking about what is impossible, perhaps we should start thinking about what is possible, and lobbying for change. Could you use a Scoop.it collection as an assessment task?
Robin Good: Here is a good and well written overview of some of the best news discovery tools out there.
These services, generally avaliable as mobile apps and/or desktop tools, aggregate a large number of relevant news sources in different categories of interest, and leverage in many cases your Facebook and Twitter network of contacts to suggest the type of stories you may be interested in the most.
Robin Good: Connexions is a place to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc.
Anyone may view or contribute: authors create and collaborate, instructors rapidly build and share custom collections, learners find and explore content.
From the official site:
"Lenses enable both organizations and individuals to give their stamps of approval to content in the repository, allowing for user-driven quality control of modules and collections.
Through these lenses, users can provide their own tags and comments for items in the repository. Lenses can also be used as "bookmarks" within the repository to keep track of related or otherwise interesting content."
Robin Good: Here are five fashion curation apps that can help you to create a visua inventory of your wardrobe, while helping you find new "combinations" and new cool products you want to buy.
Robin Good: Good video with Margot Bloomenstein, brand and content strategist, being interviewed and explaining, in very simple terms what "is" and what "it is not".
This is a good introduction to what content curation is, and how it is done as it would be explained to someone who knows nothing or very little about it.
Good material to show to top management, executives and to those who may be a bit skeptical about the benefits of doing it as well as for those who are just starting to explore this activity.
"It’s not about hoarding content indiscriminately, says Bloomstein. You have to have goals in mind from the outset.
Not every bit of content you come across will be relevant to your audience, either.
The content curation process is intended to determine what is and isn’t important, in addition to what your readers want to see. Then, it’s your job to get that content in front of them."
Robin Good: PKM or Personal Knowledge Management may be indeed a very close relative to Content Curation. But while Content Curation, is done with a specific audience in mind, PKM is done for one's own learning.
Harold Jarche, looks at the relationship between the two and writes:
"The most important part of personal knowledge management (PKM), in my opinion, is the need for active sense-making.
Merely seeking and sharing information does little other than create more noise online.
Sense-making takes time, discipline, and effort.
-> One strength of PKM is the “manual” nature of sense-making activities. 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.
-> Sense-making, or placing information into context, is where the real personal value of PKM lies.
-> The knowledge gained from PKM is an emergent property of all its activities.
Merely tagging an article does not create knowledge. ...
The difference between PKM and Curation is that the former is personal, while the latter is for an intended audience."
I have been using his framework for the past year and a half to teach curation to nonprofits. Linking curation to nonprofit staffer work flow is a great way to get people to use curation!
Robin Good: If you want to curate a timeline, a series of events, like in a week-long festival or conference, or even a course outline or a visual gallery, Timeline Tool 2.0 is an available free solution to do so.
Timeline Tool 2.0 allows anyone to construct an interactive timeline with both audio and visual effects.
Key features include:
XML based content organizer
Media player (sound and audio) on-the-fly
Link embedding
Built-in file uploader
Customized editing interface
Interactive presentation interface
Drag and drop timeline events
The finished timeline can be re-used and easily shared over the web.
Robin Good: A great example of visual curation at work. Trendland magazine features "Curating the Curated: Seafoam" a color-themed collage of inspiring and unique images based on Pantone 18-5315TPX - Bayberry.
The curated collage is "refreshed" every Tuesday and Friday with a new color-theme.
Robin Good: Zinetral is a new human-curated digital magazine that provides the best and most interesting stories from across the web on a number of specific topics.
Zinetral claims to use "real people" with "real passions" and "not algorithms to source, sift through and curate the best content out there."
From the official site: "...we employ subject matter experts as editors to facilitate the sourcing of and curate content from Blogs, Videos, Images, Photos , Infographics, Articles, Communities and a variety of sites from all corners of the world and create a quality, engaging magazine digest for reading on Smartphones and Tablets."
The Magazines will be available for reading online and offline on iOS, Android and ther devices.
ZineTral wants to become the go-to place on a range of subjects which will include Parenting, Food, Fashion, Technology, Politics and Sport, along with international and foreign language editions.
Robin Good: Readcube is a free download software (PC and Mac) which allows you to automatically update, organize, annotate, index and search-through your collection of PDF documents.
This is a great tool for anyone doing serious research in any field, whether inside or outside the official academic and scientific sectors. The key benefit of using this tool is its ability to auto-organize and enhance your existing PDF library and to help you find related documents, while appropriately linking all authors and reference notes within each paper.
Key features include:
- PDF import and auto-indexing
- Author, title and and source-journal auto-identification
- Search and view abstracts from Google Scholar and PubMed
- Get daily article recommendations based on your research interests + the contents of your library
- Create in-line comments and directly highlight key phrases
- Find automatically citations for any article in your library
- Login integration with your university or institution so you can download articles from its library without logging in separately
Robin Good: Start this video clip at 1':42" (up to 3':30") and you can get a pretty good idea of what a content curator does and why what he does has so much to do with sense-making, making things understandable for others and ultimately extracting contextualized "meaning" from information "as is".
Excellente vidéo sur le concept mapping avec un exemple sur le cheminement de l'information à l'action (début à 1'42). Merci à Robin Good et Howard Rheingold pour le partage.
Robin Good: Steve Buttry, who has already written several articles on content curation (see the end of his original article), just published this in-depth essay celebrating the launch of a new curation team at Digital First Media and pointing to many of the critical factors neeeded for a content / news curator to be effective.
He covers a lot ground while giving a particular emphasis to the importance of linking and attribution. He writes: "Where you can’t learn much about the source of content you’re curating, consider crowdsourcing the question: Note the name and organization, tell readers what you’ve found and that you’re continuing research and ask them what they know about the source.
Where the source of online content is unclear, you should be clear about what you know and where you found the material."
and...
"Sometimes the name of a person or organization is not sufficient attribution.
If the person or organization is not well-known, do a little research (Google will provide quick answers in many cases; sometimes an “about us” page will help).
Especially in political content, you want to note whether you are linking to partisan sources. A liberal or conservative think tank or political action committee is an entirely different kind of source from a professional media outlet or an independent fact-checking site."
Steve Buttry also includes some valuable key guidelines on "how to add value" when curating content and suggests several types of curation approaches that can be used in the newsroom.
Robin Good: If you are a company looking for quality content from prestigious and reliable news sources, from which you can pick and choose which stories to publish on your web site, Hearsay may be the solution you are looking for.
Hearsay Social Content Exchange aggregates content from Thomson Reuters, Tribune Media Services and Demand Media.
This new content curation platform makes it quite easy for marketers and sales people to discover engaging third-party and custom content feeds.
In fact, in addition to premium third-party content, Hearsay Social customers can create and integrate custom news channels on the platform such as your company blog, a YouTube channel, or a custom RSS feed tailored to the interests of your organization.
From these they can pick and select their preferred content and share it directly to multiple social media networks such as LinkedIN, Facebook, Twitter and Google+.
Robin Good: Daniel W. Rasmus has an interesting article on his blog entitled: "The Future of Campus Stores: Good-Bye Books, Hello Learning". In it he analyzes the key elements that will help such campus stores maintain their relevancy while traditional textbooks are rapidly loosing thir foothold inside academic campuses.
He writes: "College bookstores face an existential crisis with the looming demise of physical book sales as digital technology rapidly becomes an option for learners.
At the same time free content, via websites like the Kahn Academy, or through more proprietary means, like Apple’s iTunes University (now iTunes U).
And then there is the rise of open sourced content available places like the Open Education Resources Commons (OER).
So what should college stores consider as the elements that will help make them relevant as their core mission apparently shifts?"
And one of the key elements that he sees potentially providing new
meaning and relevance to campus bookstores, as a knowledge service, is content curation.
"One specific instance of high-quality, knowledge-based service is content curation.
As the content world becomes more complex, the college store can offer value added resources to faculty and students to help them understand the options they have, and the relative value of different sources of information and approaches to the delivery of that information.
Think about content now as software. The educator can write a specification or requirements document and the store team, like programmers, can assemble a solution for the educator that meets his or her specification. Like programmers, the language or technique doesn’t matter to the solution recipient, what matters is that the software meets the requirements and delivers its expected value."
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.
Robin Good: A valuable resource for anyone interested in the creation, organization and preservation of digital collections for the humanities, is this curated selection of resources and citations made available by the DH Curation Guide.
"The DH Curation Guide is a compilation of articles that address aspects of data curation in the digital humanities.
The goal of the DH Curation Guide is to direct readers to trusted resources with enough context from expert editors and the other members of the research community to indicate to how these resources might help them with their own data curation challenges."
Robin Good: Clipix is a Pinterest-like clipping and collection app which allows you to capture images and content from any web page and to organize it in custom visual boards.
One key feature that differentiates Clipix from Pinterest (though it is likely that Pinterest will add this feature soon as well) is the ability to organize together multiple sets into a "multiboard".
Other key features include a "Price Drop Alert" which emails you when the price of one of the commercial products you have clipped drops and
"...For example you might have a multiboard that you call “Recipe Ideas” and inside you’d have 3 clipboards: Baking Recipes, Soup Recipes, and Health Recipes.
The easiest way to create a multiboard is by dragging one clipboard from the icon in the lower right-hand corner into another clipboard."
Thank you Lelapin. The world is beautiful because it is varied. Pinterest will soon lose its "mojo" to many of these more specialized clones, which will provide more immediate value to those specifically interested in that specific area or application. I may be wrong but this is what I expect to happen.
Robin Good: I believe that content curation will play a very important role in the future of education and learning and this presentation-map focuses on this topic.
I have identified at least ten reasons that are transforming and weakening the education-certification system as it is now, and may rapidly give way to new ways of teaching, learning and getting certified which will likely involve a great deal of curation (both for those who teach/guide and those who want to learn).
In this presentation-map I am introducing the concept of curation for education, the key factors that I see are transforming traditional academic institutions and the learning industry in general, and the tools, resources and examples that are relevant to those working in these fields and wanting to find out more.
As part of my workshop session during the emerge2012 conference in which I have first presented these ideas, I have also created an "open", collaborative wiki-map where, you are welcome to contribute inspiring curated collections. You will find instructions on how to contribute to it at the end of this presentation.
"What is content curation in the context of education and why it is going to be so relevant in the near future. Benefits of content curation, examples and tools."
Robin Good: Here is the official presentation that Beth Kanter delivered yesterday, accompanied by a curated bundle of user contributions (mostly tweets) and relevant resources (stats, some visuals and other resources) outlining the key benefits that content curation can bring.
To do so, she used Storify.com which allowed her to pull in the most relevant and interesting tweets that had been posted during her webinar, as well as other relevant resources on the topics she covered.
My three picks from this Storify bundle:
- Mindless sharing is not content curation (Dara Goldberg)
- RT @ntenorg: Good content curators don't just share or collect links, they explain & make sense of a particular topic for others. (Steve Heye)
- ...@hjarche Seek-Sense-Share (PKM) model, he offers an online workshop bit.ly/HPV07M
Robin thanks so much for highlighting the storify summary - I did that right after the session because I wanted to do a quick content analysis of the tweets and see what resonated. I also did the same for the chat logs so I could gather up the questions and make sure they were answered. The session was based on an article I wrote recently on why content curation - real content curation as you describe it - can benefit nonprofits. How it can enhance staff expertise and reduce information overload. Here's a blog post that wrote sharing some of the other resources, including many of yours. http://www.bethkanter.org/?p=5690
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