Content Curation World

From the original article by Justin Reich and Beth Holland on MindShift: "What would a math class look like where students learn to compute, prove, derive, and intuit, as well as to discern and appreciate mathematical beauty?

What about a history class where students maintained a portfolio of beautiful artifacts and ideas from multiple periods?

How might efforts to curate benefit from the portability and ubiquity of mobile devices?

What would a “relevance portfolio” look like, where students catalog their daily encounters with ideas or experiences? What other kinds of portfolios could students create over the course of their academic career?"

If you are curious to get a glimpse at how tablets and their apps can be utilized to leverage curation for your classroom learning objectives, then this is definitely a good read.

You get a good introduction with some interesting historical facts about curation and about what it could be done with it in the real of education, and then you are provided with a good number of examples and tools that you can start to use right away.

Informative. Resourceful. 8/10

Full article: http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/06/to-get-the-best-out-of-tablets-for-education-classrooms-use-smart-curation/

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)