Content Curation World

HackDesign is a great example of content curation at work. The team of design curators behind this site, targeted at people interested in digital/web design, has curated the very best articles into a series of lessons and the top tools into a well-categorized toolkit.

Each lesson is per se a collection of annotated pointers to existing quality articles on the topic, and the tools are individually reviewed and organized across different application areas.

The official intro: "We've asked some of the world's best designers to help us curate the best and most useful blogs, books, games, videos, and tutorials that helped them learn critical elements of design. We're organizing them all into a digestible and iterative lesson plan so you can apply this knowledge to your own projects."

A model for anyone interested in creating a learning hub on any topic by curating the best content already available online.

Must-see. 9/10

Free to use.

Check it out now: https://hackdesign.org/ 

The curators: https://hackdesign.org/curators 

Thanks to Steve Wheeler and Oliver Quinlan for a very inspirational post about the relevance of curation for students and learning.

I think they really nail down the key issue that needs to be addressed when presenting curation as a key alternative to the present learning approach.

"The thrust of our thinking is that students arrive at University conditioned to chase the answer that they think the lecturer is looking for.  

That we can use a range of online tools to bring to the surface skills in engaging with the body of knowledge rather than collecting quotes for an essay.  

We argued that we need to take students through a paradigm shift, to enable them to understand how to read and curate that reading, having taken a critical, forensic approach to the reading they undertake."

Content Curation is a vital skill and reasonably closely aligned with the role defined as a maven and made famous in Gladwell’s book Tipping Point.

We are seeking to turn our students into the nation’s leading mavens of their discipline.

To fall in love with their body of knowledge and then write their answer, rather than seeking our answer."

And that is exactly the point. Moving from a passive, rote memorization of notions to the opportunity to investigate, research, dive in and explore a body of knowledge to create something meaningful for others to tap into.

"...how many novice learners, and in particular undergraduate students, attempt to build into their work what they believe their lecturers require from them. this is often exepmlifed with over complex, “plucked from a thesaurus”  language... 

"Just as the Melanesian islanders failed to understand the inner   workings of technology, but attempted to recreate it from its surface appearance, so undergraduate students who ‘don’t get it’ attempt to write critical essays by stringing together references into some form of meaningful narrative."

"Once students get the idea that they can write critically by being forensic and striving to understand the concepts and theories rather than simply creating replicas of texts they have only half read, they will begin to assimilate these ideas successfully in to their own thinking and ideology.  

We want to ensure that students become curators of their discipline, rather than magpies intent upon adorning their world with shiny disconnected baubles of information, with no care as to where the information came from, its author or its relationship to the rest of the body of knowledge."

The analogy with "cargo cults" presented in the article is a perfect match to illustrate easily to anyone the type of education we are providing to our students today.

Must read article. Highly recommended. 9/10

Full article: http://peteyeomans.wordpress.com/2013/06/29/students-as-curators-cargo-cults-and-chasing-the-answers/

Original: http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/cargo-cults-wooden-phones-and.html

(Image credit: www.science-store.com)