Over the past 12 weeks I have been involved in a Working Out Loud circle, based on the work and book by John Stepper. One of the outcomes of the WOL circle has been my decision to share more. One of the ways I plan to do this is through my monthly “Best of the Blogs”. Here I will curate content from a range of posts, blogs, research articles and other sources. In this month’s pick the topic is how to use Content Curation in Learning.
In the article “What is Content Curation? A Dummies’ Guide to the Hows, Whats and Whys” it is defined as “the process of aggregating data about a specific topic, distilling that information to identify the most important ideas, organising those ideas into a logical order, adding your unique spin to them, and then presenting the content to your adoring audience.” This definition is focused on content curation as a marketing tool, whereas the definition in this series of infographics is more generic, with content curation defined as “the act of finding, grouping, organising or sharing the best and most relevant content on a specific issue”. This definition fits better with the concept of content curation as a tool for training and development, where we are gathering and sharing information to educate and inform.
300 hours of video are being uploaded to YouTube every minute. Almost 5 billion videos are watched on Youtube every single day. Every minute, Google receives over 4,000,000 search queries. With so much information available “getting information off the internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant” (Mitchell Kapor).
Getting information off the internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant
As learning designers, content developers, trainers or facilitators we need to ask ourselves:
- Do we need to create any more learning content?
- Can we expect our learners to make sense of all the information that is available to them?
- How do we play a role in helping with the sense making?
The answer? Curate content from sources already available.
For me, the benefits of content curation means less development work. This results in a cheaper product for the customer and being faster to market, and greater expertise able to be used in the training. Some further benefits of curating digital content are expressed by Julia McCoy in her article “How Curation can empower content creation”. Aaron Orendorff also provides some details, including how curation can “position your organisation as thought leaders“.
In her Linkedin post, Brenda Smith asks this same question and suggests the a great place to start is to “categorise content in to three different buckets to begin with”. In Barry Feldman’s article, “How to Curate Content Without Being Mindless and Mundane”, he provides some ways to curate like a champion, which includes quoting people in your posts. Guillaume Decugis Co-Founder & CEO of curation tool Scoopit provides a number of easy and simple ways to curate relevant content.
There are a number of the free and freemium tools that are available to help you get started. This article lists the top 50 content curation tools. If looking to curate content into a functional course you should look at the capabilities of Curatr. It is a social and collaborative learning platform that lets you use content from any source and organise it into bitesize playlists that learners can browse in any order.
Obviosuly there are pitfalls to avoid when curating content. Joyce Seitzinger describes some of the pitfalls of content curation, including developing the unfavourable traits of the hoarder, the scrooge, the tabloid or the robot. The legal and ethical considerations So, if we are curating content what are the legal considerations? How does this impact on copyright? Is it ethical to use another person’s work? Ben Betts provides one golden rule of content curation “Never copy content; Link to it”. He also talks about a “fair use policy”, which is echoed in Guillaume Decugi’s latest article “Does ethical content curation exist?” where he talks about the win-win-win of ethical content curation.
Curating content is a great way to provide rich and engaging learning content to users, without the need for development. I have developed a number of courses using curated content with positive feedback from users. With the volume of content out there you need to develop the skills to be an effective content curator, and apply the crap test to the content that is available.
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