# data[].attributes.body
This Padlet draws together content about digital content curation with a range of resources to expand upon and enhance the reading experience. It is based upon the article published in SCIS Connections Issue 2 2018. This article explores how digital content curation may be the secret weapon teacher librarians and teachers may use to enrich their students’ research, enabling the development of information and digital literacy skills.

Presenting information using Padlet also demonstrates a creative way that digital content curation may be used as a pedagogical tool, and models one way that curation may be embedded within a larger digital resource.

Each entry on the Padlet has been created to allow for comments and 'likes'. This provides a level of interactivity not possible in print. So please feel free to join the discussion, share your thoughts and experiences, and enjoy this digital resource!

# data[].attributes.body
This video provides a short (1.5 minutes) and thorough overview of content curation. It describes how curation is value adding, and that the role of the curator is not simply to aggregate; but to add meaning, synthesise and share information in new and innovative ways. The infographic below provides differentiation into the differences between accumulation, collection, aggregation and curation.

# data[].attributes.headline
The evolution of curation - from confusion to control

# data[].attributes.subject
The evolution of curation - from confusion to control

# data[].attributes.body
Click on the image below to access an infographic that differentiates accumulating, collecting, aggregating and curation.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Evolution of Curation | Piktochart Visual Editor

# data[].attributes.headline
The pearl necklace metaphor for curation

# data[].attributes.subject
The pearl necklace metaphor for curation

# data[].attributes.body
You can find Frank Chimero's entire post here. A key point is his explanation differentiating collection from curation.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
To prepare for an upcoming lecture, I've been thinking about the relationship between collecting and curating. This morning, I tweeted:

Thinking about collecting vs. curating, and how the internet is muddying the line between the two.

I didn't realize it at the time, but it seems I hit something unexpected with that tweet. I received many responses from folks telling me what they thought the line between the two were. The gist for most is:

Collection is additive. Curation is subtractive. Collecting is for yourself, curating is for others.

The size of the group of things and the presence of an audience are the two characteristics that are used as touchstones. Those seem to be the right things to discuss, but the internet makes them trickier to pin down.

For instance, I would consider my Pinboard account a collection of links, but it has an audience because it is public. Is it still a collection?

Or, many of the blogs that people say are curated are usually a group of beautiful images rolling down a webpage. What distinguishes that from my Pinboard page of links?

I think the thing that separates the two is intent, not in the size of the pool of stuff or in the presence of an audience, but rather in the implied purpose of the gathering of content. To me, collecting is usually about propagation-the collection grows in quantity and diversity. Curating seems to be about illumination, and having that set of selected items, no matter the size, come to a point.

I've recently launched another blog called The Mavenist, which could be considered a collection, but it feels to be squarely in the realm of curation. What is the difference? It is in the arrangement. Collecting is having all the pearls lose on the table, curating is stringing them together into a necklace. (Of course, there is no better or worse between those two situations. One just has an extra pass of arrangement.) This is why my Flickr favorites feels like a collection, while a feature on Pictory is definitely a curatorial endeavor.

I'd say that the web seems to be mostly comprised of collections, because we don't frequently arrange the things that we have found. Curation is marked by a larger structure, a gestalt made by the arrangement of individual items, sort of like a constellation of stars. The first step of curation, much like collecting, is selecting (and there is an art to that). The second is arranging and sorting those things in a purposeful way. We choose the stars in a constellation, but they become Orion's Belt because of their position, arrangement, and the prescribed meaning we put on that particular arrangement.

This means that it's worth considering how we sort things on the web. Information architecture luminary Richard Saul Wurman said that all information can be arranged in a few different ways. He called it LATCH:

Right now, chronological ordering is the default way to arrange content online, and I wonder how that blanket presumption affects curation on the web. Does it make sense, because people check in frequently, or is it odd, like sorting a stack of photographs alphabetically by who is in them? There are indeed instances where sorting by time is the correct path, but it will be exciting over the next few months and years to see what happens to the web as we recognize the instances where the newest thing is not necessarily the most important thing. (And, as always, the additional problem on top of this: can this sorting process be automated?)

Can you curate on the web? Most curation comes to a point through narrative, and is narrative possible on the web? Stories require a certain amount of linearity, and we all know how the web disrupts that. Maybe it is the same problem that video games have, where interactivity subverts storytelling. In my own attempts, I've tried to create narrative by using the one linear experience I could find: scrolling. I'm still not sure on this one, because scrolling to tell a story, while fun, doesn't really scale across the web.

But is scrolling through a collection the same? I think it's important to note that while we may collect for ourselves, those collections are being published, creating incidental audiences. I collect my Flickr favorites for me, but they are accessible to you, so what obligations do I have to you when I consider to favorite something? What happens when sharing is the default rather than purposeful? It blurs the line between curation and collecting into something more of a gradient than a binary this-or-that. And that's why those neat definitions in the tweets seem slightly off. The situation isn't as tidy as it used to be. The line between curating and collecting has turned into a situation similar to when you ask someone to describe what makes something vulgar. The answer for both is the same: "I'll know it when I see it."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
To prepare for an upcoming lecture, I've been thinking about the relationship between collecting and curating. This morning, I tweeted: Thinking about collecting vs. curating, and how the internet is muddying the line between the two. I didn't realize it at the time, but it seems I hit something unexpected with that tweet.

# data[].attributes.body
Consider collection as a bowl of loose pearls, and curation as a pearl necklace. The individual pearls in the bowl may be of great value,but they are pretty useless, just gathered together. Curation is what happens when particular pearls are selected from the bowl, and strung into a beautiful necklace. The pearls now have purpose – they have been selected and added to the necklace in order. The necklace has fewer pearls than the bowl, but as it can be publicly admired and worn, is may be considered to have more worth.
(Image sourced from the Public Domain)

# data[].attributes.headline
An information and digital literacy meta-skill

# data[].attributes.subject
An information and digital literacy meta-skill

# data[].attributes.body
Adopting the curation approach outlined by Weisgerber (2011) seen above, students must find, select, editorialise, create and share their collection. Read more about Weisgerber's explanation of curation in her Slideshare presentation  https://www.slideshare.net/corinnew/building-thought-leadership-through-content-curation

Each of these steps encourages students to develop and apply many different information and digital literacy strategies. Breaking down each of these steps makes it possible to identify just what these strategies are,and demonstrates the rich teaching opportunities embedded at every stage of the process.

# data[].attributes.body
This requires more than a simple Google search! This first step in the curation process requires students to develop their expert searching skills, so that they go beyond the first hits returned by the search engine, to find relevant information that warrants inclusion in their collection.

The Padlet below contains a range of links to resources to support expert searching for students.

# data[].attributes.body
Critical evaluation of information is a key skill that every student must develop in our environment of information abundance. Through the process of content curation, students must apply a number of different evaluative approaches to select resources and information that is of the highest quality and most aligned to the purpose and audience of the collection.Developing skills to critically evaluate information is an ongoing process for all of us, particularly as online publishing makes it increasingly difficult to identify the credible information from that which is of dubious quality. The series of web posts below provide information and resources about ways to develop information and critical literacy.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This is the first of three posts which focus on information and critical literacy. This first post outlines the importance of developing information and critical literacy. The second post will give specific strategies and tools to use when evaluating information found online, while the third post focuses on verification of social media. Slides to support these blog posts are available on Slideshare.

The democratization of content creation is a wonderful thing; even as I type, I am enjoying the ability to publish to a worldwide audience. Thanks to the thousands of content creation and distribution platforms including WordPress, Scribd, Weebly, Storify, and of course YouTube just to name a few, millions of voices which might have never been heard have a channel to communicate their message. Content is being created at a mindblowing rate:Click the image to open the interactive version (via
http://pennystocks.la/).
Whereas previously content had to pass through extensive editorial processes prior to work being published, there is no such on the internet. Therefore we see just as much accurate as inaccurate information being posted online; a horrifying example being footage posted on Twitter, which was circulated as from the Brussells terror attack, but which was later revealed as footage from an earlier bombing in Belarus.

Disturbingly, it's not just the accuracy of assignments that are at risk by this spread of misinformation; at the height of the Ebola crisis, according to this article by the Washington Post, 84 people had self-published Ebola e-books on Amazon in just 90 days; and almost all of them include information that's either wildly misleading or flat-out wrong.

We need to develop skills in what Howard Rheingold calls 'Crap' Detection - knowledge of how to find and verify accurate, useful information - or basic information literacy for the internet age. This type of literacy is something which must be taught to students, and which must be brought to the attention of anyone who uses the internet as an information source - which, it seems, in Australia at least, is most people.

So what are these information literacy skills, and how do we learn them?
This series of posts attempts to outline some of the strategies, tips and tricks which can be applied to ensure the accuracy of information sourced from the internet; of course, much of it comes along with the fact that a little common sense goes a long way...

The multimodal nature of the internet allows users to create any version of truth. You might have seen the Dove Evolution video, where an attractive young woman is 'transformed' into a supermodel using photoshop; more recently, a human interest reporter Esther Honig wanted to see just how much culture influences beauty, and so she had the idea to ask 40 photo editors in 25 different countries to photoshop her picture.
"Make me look beautiful," was the brief. The results show the amazing way the internet connects us, and the way technology can manipulate what we believe to be true.

For students, the internet is the dominant medium and place they go to for information. In a world of information overload, it is vital for students to not only find information but also determine its validity and appropriateness.

For teachers in particular, it is necessary to not only have these skills, but also to be able to educate students to become informed, literate, self directed learners, who are able to navigate effectively the information accessible on the internet. Mandy Lupton, in her research on inquiry and the Australian Curriculum, has found that inquiry skills and information literacy are embedded in the Australian Curriculum in the subject areas Science, History, Geography, Economics and Business, Civics and Citizenship, Digital Technologies and in the general capabilities Critical and Creative Thinking (CCT) and Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) . A huge part of being an effective learner and being able to research critically is being able to determine what is quality information, and where to source it from; after all,

See more on Know Your Meme

Click here to access the next post which explores Alan November's 'REAL' strategy, and provides tools and strategies to apply in order to verify information discovered online. The third and final post, on critical literacy and social media is available here.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Information and Critical Literacy in the Web World

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This is the first of three posts which focus on information and critical literacy. This first post outlines the importance of developing information and critical literacy. The second post will give specific strategies and tools to use when evaluating information found online, while the third post focuses on verification of social media.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This is the second post in the series on developing critical and information literacy. The first post explored the need for critical literacy when learning from the web. This post explores strategies, tools and techniques for evaluating and verifying the credibility of information discovered online. The third and final post explores social media and how to verify its validity.

The ability to publish to a global audience is within the reach of anyone with a device and an internet connection. Identifying the signal in the noise is a challenge for anyone, and is a skill that must be taught. Fortunately there are many tools and tricks that make this easier.

Alan November, is an international consultant who is known around the world for his work in educational technology. He presents a great strategy for students (and anyone!) to apply whenever they are researching and need to confirm the reliability of the source of their information. He calls it the 'REAL' test. REAL stands for:

1. READ the URL: When browsing the web or doing research, it is easy to follow one link after another, ending up somewhere completely different to where you started. Reading the URL in the location bar is the best way to answer the question where am I?. It is good to have the habit of checking the URL to see if you are where we thought you were, and to check the credibility of the website and therefore its information.

This diagram breaks apart a standard web address:

Most web addresses begin with the letters 'http', which stands for Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol - the protocol which allows two computers to communicate. If you see an 's' added (https), this indicates a secure protocol is being used. You are most likely to see the secure protocol being used on sites where personal information such as banking details or credit card details are being communicated, like when shopping online.

The domain is the part of the URL which commonly identifies which company, agency or organization may be either directly responsible for the information, or is providing the computer space where the information is stored. In 2014, the number of active domains reached 271 million. The domain name may give clues as to whether the information can be trusted, but it is not the only part of the URL that is useful. The domain extension usually identifies the type of organization that created or sponsored the resource: e.g. * .com which identifies company or commercial sites,*.edu for educational sites,* .gov for government sites or * .net for Internet service providers or other types of networks.

If the domain extension is two letters, it identifies a country, e.g. .us for the United States, .uk for the United Kingdom, .au for Australia, .mx for Mexico or .ca for Canada. This can be useful if you are researching country specific information. For example, I often add site:.au to my searches if I am only looking for Australian results.

Information after part of the address is the file path, which shows where the file you are looking at is stored. This is really important. You can see in the example above that the file path is /~oddone/tutorials/page1. While the domain name is useful to identify the validity or quality of a website, the filepath is also really important to look at. If the filepath has a personal name, a tilde, a percentage sign or the words 'user, people or members' it might mean you are on a personal site.

This is often the case with sites that have the extension .edu, - it is quite common for universities to give personal space on their servers to students - this means that the information on the page has not been published by the university, but is the personal page of student and therefore the information is not subject to the checks and balances that would be on the official university pages.

A good example of this is this website, the life and work of Jacopo di Poggibonsi which can be found at http://www.umich.edu/~engtt516/lifetimes.html. Although the site is hosted on the University of Michigan's website, it is a very cleverly created forgery - no such person ever existed. The presence of the tilde indicates that the website is merely being hosted by the University.

2. Examine the site's content and history:

creative commons licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by dullhunk

The currency of a webpage can often be seen by the date at the base of the page. However this only really tells you when the page text was copyrighted or last published. How can you see if the information is regularly updated, or if the website has changed over time? We can chart the progress or history of a web site thanks to the Wayback Machine.

The Wayback Machine: allows you to browse through 430 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago. To use this site type in the URL of a site or page of which you would like to research, and click the Take Me Back button. Once you have conducted your search, select from the archived dates available. This gives you an idea of how the site has developed over time, whether changes have been made and how regularly the information is updated.

3. Ask about the publisher or the author: Using a domain lookup service like easywhois, you can see who owns the site or who has published the material.

Alan November the example of martinlutherking.org because it is one that students could easily choose (it comes up very high in search results) and has been published to look appealing to students. Using a domain lookup to find the owner of the site reveals it is actually hosted by the server stormfront.org . If you search stormfront, you will find that it is a white supremacist organisation. You might not use this type of tool all the time, but if you are looking at information which could be controversial, open to bias or if you would like to know more about the publisher, this can be a handy tool to use.

Sometimes it just takes a simple Google of some key information from the site to check its reliability - take this example: The idea of conducting Lasik laser eye surgery at home doesn't immediately ring warning bells - and this graphic from the website should be warning enough!!

However, if users are still unsure, a simple Google search for the Doctor who appears on the site confirms that this is indeed a hoax:

4. Look at the links: Students usually only search using one search engine. They also believe that the top hits are the most important. Sadly, this is not in fact the case. Many businesses specialise in SEO - Search Engine Optimisation. SEO is all about improving the visibility of a web page in search engines search results. The higher ranked on the search results page your website is, and more frequently your site appears in the search results, the more visitors it will receive. The process of getting a website to appear high in the listings returned by a search is not based on luck, but on a complex series of strategies, including how the website has been built, and what key words are embedded in the metadata of a website.

creative commons licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by tamper74

A great activity to explore the way web rankings work is to get students to enter Australia into the Google search bar. These are the results they will probably get:

Google: Australia
Why did WIKIPEDIA get first hit?
What is common about top three sites?

The search looks at the search terms and tries to compare with other content. When lots of pages have similar titles or content, it is the links that make a difference. Wikipedia almost always comes up at the top of a search not just because it is well known and popular, but also because there are so many sites that link to each Wikipedia page.

You can find out what sites are linking to the site you are evaluating by typing in the word link: and then adding the web address. Take the first site- Wikipedia address and type link: with address. It returns a list of websites that link to the site. Quite often, the more links the website has to it, the higher it appears on the hit list.

Here is an example of how you can use this tool as another way of evaluating its content. When I searched using the link: strategy and the blog post I wrote during my time at Brisbane Catholic Education, you can see that three hits show that other educational websites have linked to the blog. If these educational websites consider the blog of value to share to their readers, then it is more likely that the content is reliable.

The links to site will allow students to build a map of related commentary -who uses this site and considers it important enough to link to it?

The third and final part of this blog series explores using verification strategies when searching for information using social media. If you missed the first part of this three part blog series, click here.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This is the second post in the series on developing critical and information literacy. The first post explored the need for critical literacy when learning from the web. This post explores strategies, tools and techniques for evaluating and verifying the credibility of information discovered online.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This is the third and final in the blog series on developing information and critical literacy skills for identifying quality information online. After exploring why these skills are important, in the first post, and then investigating the grammar of websites in the second post, this final post provides some tools to consider when verifying information which has been published via social media such as Twitter and YouTube.

A Pew Research paper on how teens research in the digital world found that 52% of students access YouTube or other social media sites when searching for information for their assignments. Although not perhaps considered a traditional source of information, sites such as Twitter and YouTube are increasingly being accessed as a 'way in' to complex topics. These sources too require specific skills to identify reliable, accurate and quality information, perhaps even more so that websites. This is because the nature of social media is that it is designed often for quickly uploading and sharing information; there is very little skill level required to post to social media, vs the skills needed for web publishing; therefore an even larger group is publishing content which may or may not be correct. The personal nature of many posts also means that it is very open to bias, and the social nature means that scams, jokes and misleading posts are much more likely.

creative commons licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by mkhmarketing

A fantastic and interesting way to learn more about how to verify information discovered via social media is to explore the work of the modern journalist. Often, information about breaking events is caught or reported by citizens 'on the ground', and is shared via social media much more quickly than traditional news services can. Therefore, for journalists reporting on news as it happens, often extensive investigation must take place to ensure the photo, video or blog post is verifiable, and not simply for notoriety or hoax value.

The Verification Handbook is a really interesting read (and free to download) which shares a range of tools and strategies for how journalists verify information, using real case studies.
Of course, students who are researching won't necessarily go to the lengths that journalists go to to identify the veracity of information they find online, but it is good be aware of strategies which are easy to apply if they aren't sure of the accuracy of information.

Three ways identified in the handbook to verify the accuracy of information on social media include:

Provenance - is this the original piece of content?
Source - Who uploaded the content?
Date - when was the content created?

Finding this information requires the use of a combination of tools.

One of the most useful tools for establishing the provenance of images is the Tin Eye reverse image search tool. Tin Eye begins with the image, and searches back, to attempt to establish where an image came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or if there is a higher resolution version. This is particularly useful if you have the feeling that an image has been doctored. You can install the Tin Eye plug in for Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari or Chrome, or you can just go to the Tin Eye website and paste the image link or drag and drop the image itself. Click on this link to see some of the more interesting versions of images that Tin Eye has discovered.

When looking at the source to verify who uploaded the content, there are several things to take note of. Look at the account of the person posting the information; what is the quality and content of their previous posts? Look for slight inconsistencies in their name (e.g. Julian Gillard), when did they create the account? You can also be guided by the blue tick on Twitter accounts which indicate that they have been verified, but this, like anything else, may be faked. More information about verified Twitter accounts is here.

Just doing a search for a well known person on Twitter can reveal the range of accounts purportedly belonging to the same person. This is a great activity to demonstrate how closely users need to examine accounts, and how easily one may be fooled into thinking posts are from someone from whom they are not.

To verify the date that information was published, journalists have to go to great extremes to verify the accuracy of information they receive via social media; sometimes searching the weather at the time an photo was taken to identify a match, or using Google Maps to match background scenery to confirm the event took place where it was said to.

While students aren't necessarily dealing with breaking information, they do need to apply a little bit of critical awareness to information that they gather from social media. Simply double checking information against a number of different sources is one of the best ways to identify the reliability of information; as well as having a little bit of general knowledge and common sense.

For those who wish to dig a little deeper, the Verification Handbook website has published a list of tools that are useful for verifying identity, places and images.

These three posts (click for post one or two if you missed them) have attempted to provide a summary to this huge area. I have collated a list of resources and tools on my Pinterest board for further reading and information. I'd love to hear of any other tips, tools or strategies you have found useful when evaluating online sources of information.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Tricks to find the truth: Information literacy and social media

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This is the third and final in the blog series on developing information and critical literacy skills for identifying quality information online. After exploring why these skills are important, in the first post, and then investigating the grammar of websites in the second post, this final post provides some tools to consider when verifying information which has been published via social media such as Twitter and YouTube.

# data[].attributes.headline
Editorialising or annotating the collection

# data[].attributes.subject
Editorialising or annotating the collection

# data[].attributes.body
Adding an editorial note or annotation to each inclusion within the curated collection is a key step which is often overlooked. Although time consuming, these short passages add real value to the collection, and separate a curated collection from an aggregated list. Ideally, the annotation should explain to others why each piece was chosen, and how it fits within the collection. This makes the individual items more meaningful for others, and brings to collection together as a whole resource.

This blog post explores how adding annotations and telling a story around the resources curated into a collection adds value and takes a group of resources beyond the simple save to create a useful resource that may be shared with others, and which ultimately may save time.

Requiring editorials for each curated item enables students to demonstrate higher level thinking skills, as they must summarise each article, identify how it contributes to the collection and if possible, draw links between it and other items within the group. Students are therefore practicing how to evaluate, analyse and synthesise each item, and in doing so,are creating a unique digital artefact which positively contributes to their online digital footprint.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Who has a busy life? I know I do. In fact, almost everyone I know does. Juggling family, work, study, all the household chores and trying to squeeze in a life as well - this seems to describe everyone in 2017.

As a PhD student and educator, I spend a lot of time online - researching, reading articles, connecting with others on Twitter and (yes, I admit it!) admiring pretty pictures of yummy food on Pinterest. One thing that happens to me all the time is that I only find the best article, the most interesting infographic or the yummiest recipe when I am in the middle of something else, and I really have no time! I'm busy! And so, I save it for later. I will pin it, or favourite it, or email it to myself. Of course, later never comes - and I have loads of unread emails, lists of links and hundreds of bookmarks that I honestly know I will never come back to - and really, do I need to? After all, I have great searching skills. Surely if I've discovered it once, I can find it again if and when I want it? And thus the question: is it better to save it for later, or to let it flow past me, trusting that I will find what I need, when I need it?

Despite the hundreds of unread, unloved 'saves' that I have made in my lifetime, I am still convinced that it is worth it. Even though I have confidence in my searching skills, I still don't take chances when it comes to finding things again online - here's a few reasons why.

Firstly,

the internet these days is very big - and a lot of the content on the internet is user-created. This is one of the reasons I love the internet so much - rather than only being able to access information from officially sanctioned (published) voices, we can now access content and information created and shared by anyone with an internet connection. While this has led to a lot of rubbish online, it also means we have more to learn from than ever before. However, this also means that the item you have discovered may not have any useful metadata attached to it.

Metadata is the information about information that makes it easy to search for and find. When content is officially published, details such as the title, author's name, subject headings, ISBN etc (i.e. the metadata) are attached - either printed on the item or electronically attached. User created content may not have this type of metadata, and if it does, it might not be meaningful for searching. It might be a photograph with no title, a recipe for Chilli that someone has shared on Tumblr with the hashtags #yummy' and #dinner next Monday' or a blog with a long, obscure or unrelated name. So much great stuff is, I am sure, buried, nameless, published only in a Facebook post, and shared on Diigo with a completely irrelevant tag (like 'this is good' or 'idea for next week'). Searching for these things can be almost impossible, especially if you are looking for that particular piece of content (say that one random blog post you read 4 months ago, or that vegan chilli recipe with no tomatoes) because even if you use a super search string like "yummy chilli" -tomatoes odds are, it will be lost deep on the millionth page of Google.

Secondly,

a lot of great stuff that we discover online is completely through serendipity, and while effective searching will return a lot of content, Google will simply not find everything. You may be searching for an item that is sitting somewhere Google doesn't access - not only lots of social media content but also sites that require a login, like a journal database or library catalogue. You may have seen it once - briefly appearing on your Twitter stream, perhaps when the author published it - but this is the only time you will see it unless you go directly back to that source. Saving things when you see them can be well worth the time required to click 'save to Pocket' or 'send to G Drive'. Even if you can't link directly to the source within the database, linking to the Paywall gives you enough information to access it again if you decide that you really need it.

Collection or Curation?

However; there is a reason I called this post 'digital content curation in a busy life' and not 'saving stuff for later is good'. The thing is, simply pinning or bookmarking 'for later' is not digital content curation - it is collecting. We need to consider the difference between digital content curation and collecting, and keep this front of mind when online.

Digital content curation is what we should do when we find something really good. Digital content curation goes beyond a simple save. It is when we strategically select an item to be added to a collection, which is being compiled for a specific purpose. Collecting is additive, but interestingly, curation is subtractive - what you leave out is almost more important than what you include. A great way to think about collection and curation described by Frank Chimero in his post about sorting a mass. Consider collection as a bowl of loose pearls, and curation as a pearl necklace. Collection is like a bowl of pearls in that the individual pearls may be of great value, but they are pretty useless, just gathered together in the bowl. Curation iswhat happens when particular pearls are selected from the bowl, and strung into a beautiful necklace. The pearls now have purpose - they have been carefully selected and added to the necklace in a particular order. The necklace, which has fewer pearls than in the bowl, but which can be publicly admired and worn, is worth more than the sum of its parts.

When we curate content, we add an annotation to each item, to explain to others why this piece was chosen, and how it fits within the collection. This makes the individual items more meaningful for others, and brings to collection together as a whole resource. As you can see, digital content curation is time-consuming. So why, in a post about busy people, would I be extolling the benefits of digital content curation?

First: it does not replace the simple save.

Digital content curation is a purposeful act which takes time. So it is important to still quickly 'save' stuff when we see it. However, if you go back through your saves, and see something that is really good, that would add to a collection you are already curating or would springboard a curated collection, definitely take the time to move it out of your 'collection' and into your curated resources.

Second:digital content curation creates a resource for you and others

When you have a collection of random links, the individual items may be useful, but the list itself means nothing. A carefully curated collection is a resource that stands alone. It can be useful to you - when you go back to these resources, your annotation will remind you of why you saved it and how it will be useful - and it will be of value to others if they are seeking an overview/introduction/entry into a topic. Creating a curated collection also makes a group of resources easily shareable and useable - it will 'travel' with you as it will (more often than not) exist online, and be publicly accessible to you and others whenever you need it.

Third: a curated collection is worth the time and may eventually save time

A curated collection will take time. However it is far more likely that you will go back to a collection which has been carefully created than you ever will to a random link you saved and emailed to yourself six months ago. Also, just as you invest time in developing curated collections, so too do others. Seeking out others' curated collections can be a fantastic way to begin a search journey. People don't (usually) curate items of poor quality - that would be a waste of time! And so when you discover a curated collection of information or resources, you are more likely to have discovered something of value - which can be a greater time-saver than simply searching, and having to evaluate each item yourself. Caution though! Just because someone has curated something doesn't mean it is completely accurate/reliable/valid for your purposes - but the chances of higher quality are greater.

So the role of digital content curation in a busy life is to take back some control over infowhelm and content chaos. Knowing that you have carefully curated collections can be comforting, particularly in areas where you work extensively or are continually referring to and developing ideas. Maybe it is because I'm a librarian at heart, but I really love curating. I don't always do it well, and I don't always have the time to go beyond the save, but when I am working on a project or researching a topic, going to the effort of creating a resource that I know will support my work is satisfying and rewarding. It's like comfort food for the learner's soul.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The role of digital content curation in a busy life.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Who has a busy life? I know I do. In fact, almost everyone I know does. Juggling family, work, study, all the household chores and trying to squeeze in a life as well - this seems to describe everyone in 2017.

# data[].attributes.body
There are many online tools which exist for the creation of digital curated collections. Deciding which to choose requires an awareness of audience, of the capabilities of each tool for presentation and a knowledge of digital publication strategies. The post below includes an infographic which provides an overview of the things to consider when choosing which tool best suits your needs. A printable PDF version is available at http://www.linkinglearning.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Choosing-a-curation-tool.pdf

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
After my previous post regarding the place of curation in a busy person's life, I have been asked by several people about which curation platform to choose.

Obviously there are plenty of tools out there, and each has its benefits and disadvantages. The choice is dependent upon personal preference (some tools you will like, others you just won't warm to) as well as the purpose for your curation.

If you are curating highly visual material, a text heavy bookmarking tool will not create an arresting curated collection. However complex topics with many sub-topics may benefit from a text based tool with a tagging feature, which enables you to search within an already curated collection for finer grained sorting. If you have an audience of school students, particularly groups under 13 years of age, check whether an account is required to view the finished collection. There is no point spending hours creating a resource that users cannot access because they do not have an account.

Also look at publishing options. If you are hoping to include your curated collection in a blog, make sure that the final product will have an embed code so that you can present the collection beautifully. If simple sharing on social media or via email is all you are planning, then a weblink will suffice.

I have collected a range of different tool options on the following Pinterest board. Below the Pinterest board, you will see an infographic (click on the link below the infographic for a printable version) which reviews several tools and provides a summary of things to consider when deciding on a tool.

The most important thing is to choose a tool you like and are comfortable with - and happily, with so many options to choose from, there is bound to be a perfect tool out there for you!

Created using Visme. An easy-to-use Infographic Maker.
Download a printable version (PDF)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
After my previous post regarding the place of curation in a busy person's life, I have been asked by several people about which curation platform to choose. Obviously there are plenty of tools out there, and each has its benefits and disadvantages.

# data[].attributes.body
The value of a digital curated collection is lost if it is not shared. Students may be encouraged to include their collections on library webpages for future students to make use of, or may include the collection as part of a larger digital project such as a blog or website. They can seek feedback on their collection by emailing or communicating the link via social networks, and can include the web address as evidence of their learning in digital portfolios. Understanding how a digital curated collection may be shared provides new learning opportunities as we encourage students to actively and positively develop their online presence for future purposes.

# data[].attributes.body
Digital content curation is a meta-skill, and it is evident that it includes array of information and digital literacy skills. The process of digital content curation offers many learning opportunities that are ideally taught by the teacher librarian and teacher within the context of a larger research project. Below is a collection of ideas, strategies and tips for curation, and an excellent article linking curation with the higher levels of Bloom's Taxonomy, complete with suggestions for innovative ways to include curation in lessons.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Listen to this post as a podcast:
If no one has ever encouraged, pushed, or insisted that you build more higher-order thinking into your students' learning, it's possible you've been teaching in a cave.

Higher-level thinking has been a core value of educators for decades. We learned about it in college. We hear about it in PD. We're even evaluated on whether we're cultivating it in our classrooms: Charlotte Danielson's Framework for Teaching, a widely used instrument to measure teacher effectiveness, describes a distinguished teacher as one whose "lesson activities require high-level student thinking" (Domain 3, Component 3c).

All that aside, most teachers would say they want their students to be thinking on higher levels, that if our teaching kept students at the lowest level of Bloom's Taxonomy -simply recalling information-we wouldn't be doing a very good job as teachers.

And yet, when it's time to plan the learning experiences that would have our students operating on higher levels, some of us come up short. We may not have a huge arsenal of ready-to-use, high-level tasks to give our students. Instead, we often default to having students identify and define terms, label things, or answer basic recall questions. It's what we know. And we have so much content to cover, many of us might feel that there really isn't time for the higher-level stuff anyway.

If this sounds anything like you, I have a suggestion: Try a curation assignment.

When a museum director curates, she collects artifacts, organizes them into groups, sifts out everything but the most interesting or highest-quality items, and shares those collections with the world. When an editor curates poems for an anthology, he does the same thing.

The process can be applied to all kinds of content: A person could curate a collection of articles, images, videos, audio clips, essays, or a mixture of items that all share some common attribute or theme. When we are presented with a list of the "Top 10" anything or the "Best of" something else, what we're looking at is a curated list. Those playlists we find on Spotify and Pandora? Curation. "Recommended for You" videos on Netflix? Curation. The news? Yep, it's curated. In an age where information is ubiquitous and impossible to consume all at once, we rely on the curation skills of others to help us process it all.

In an educational setting, curation has a ton of potential as an academic task. Sure, we're used to assigning research projects, where students have to gather resources, pull out information, and synthesize that information into a cohesive piece of informational or argumentative writing. This kind of work is challenging and important, and it should remain as a core assignment throughout school, but how often do we make the collection of resources itself a stand-alone assignment?

That's what I'm proposing we do. Curation projects have the potential to put our students to work at three different levels of Bloom's Taxonomy:

Understand, where we exemplify and classify information

Analyze, where we distinguish relevant from irrelevant information and organize it in a way that makes sense

Evaluate, where we judge the quality of an item based on a set of criteria

If we go beyond Bloom's and consider the Framework for 21st Century Learning put out by the Partnership for 21st Century Learning, we'll see that critical thinking is one of the 4C's listed as an essential skill for students in the modern age (along with communication, creativity, and collaboration) and a well-designed curation project requires a ton of critical thinking.

So what would a curation project look like?

Suppose you're teaching U.S. history, and you want students to understand that our constitution is designed to be interpreted by the courts, and that many people interpret it differently. So you create a curation assignment that focuses on the first amendment.

The task: Students must choose ONE of the rights given to us by the first amendment. To illustrate the different ways people interpret that right, students must curate a collection of online articles, images, or videos that represent a range of beliefs about how far that right extends. For each example they include, they must summarize the point of view being presented and include a direct quote where the author or speaker's biases or beliefs can be inferred.

Here is what one submission might look like, created on a platform called eLink (click here to view the whole thing).

Because they are finding examples of a given concept and doing some summarizing, students in this task are working at the Understand level of Bloom's. But they are also identifying where the author or speaker is showing bias or purpose, which is on the Analyze level.

Ranked Collection: Students collect a set of articles, images, videos, or even whole websites based on a set of criteria (the most "literary" song lyrics of the year, or the world's weirdest animal adaptations) and rank them in some kind of order, justifying their rankings with a written explanation or even a student-created scoring system. Each student could be tasked with creating their own collection or the whole class could be given a pre-selected collection to rank. This would be followed by a discussion where students could compare and justify their rankings with those of other students. (Bloom's Level: Evaluate)

Shared Trait Collection: This would house items that have one thing in common. This kind of task would work in so many different subject areas. Students could collect articles where our government's system of checks and balances are illustrated, images of paintings in the impressionist style, videos that play songs whose titles use metaphors. It could even be used as part of a lesson using the concept attainment strategy, where students develop an understanding of a complex idea by studying "yes" and "no" examples of it. By curating their own examples after studying the concept, they will further developing their understanding of it. (Bloom's Level: Understand).

Literature Review: As the first step of a research project, students could collect relevant resources and provide a brief summary of each one, explaining how it contributes to the current understanding of their topic. As high school students prepare for college, having a basic understanding of what a literature review is and the purpose it serves-even if they are only doing it with articles written outside of academia-will help them take on the real thing with confidence when that time comes. (Bloom's Levels: Understand for the summarization, Analyze for the sorting and selecting of relevant material)

Video Playlist: YouTube is bursting at the seams with videos, but how much of it is actually good? Have students take chunks of your content and curate the best videos out there to help other students understand those concepts. In the item's description, have students explain why they chose it and what other students will get out of it. (Bloom's Levels: Understand for summarization, Evaluate for judging the quality of the videos)

Museum Exhibit: Task students with curating a digital "exhibit" around a given theme. The more complex the theme, the more challenging the task. For example, they might be asked to assume the role of a museum owner who hates bees, and wants to create a museum exhibit that teaches visitors all about the dangers of bees. This kind of work would help students understand that even institutions that might not own up to any particular bias, like museums, news agencies, or tv stations, will still be influenced by their own biases in how they curate their material. (Bloom's Level: Understand if it's just a collection of representative elements, Create if they are truly creating a new "whole" with their collection, such as representing a particular point of view with their choices)

Real World Examples: Take any content you're teaching (geometry principles, grammar errors, science or social studies concepts) and have students find images or articles that illustrate that concept in the real world. (Bloom's level: Understand).

Favorites: Have students pull together a personal collection of favorite articles, videos, or other resources for a Genius Hour, advisory, or other more personalized project: A collection of items to cheer you up, stuff to boost your confidence, etc. Although this could easily slide outside the realm of academic work, it would make a nice activity to help students get to know each other at the start of a school year or give them practice with the process of curation before applying it to more content-related topics.

Most of the above activities would not be very academically challenging if students merely had to assemble the collection. Adding a thoughtfully designed written component is what will make students do their best thinking in a curation assignment.

The simplest way to do this is to require a written commentary with each item in the collection. Think about those little signs that accompany every item at a museum: Usually when you walk into an exhibit, you find a sign or display that explains the exhibit as a whole, then smaller individual placards that help visitors understand the significance of each piece in the collection. When students put their own collections together, they should do the same thing.

Be specific about what you'd like to see in these short writing pieces, and include those requirements in your rubric. Then go a step further and create a model of your own, so students have a very clear picture of how the final product should look. Because this is a genre they have probably not done any work in before, they will do much better with this kind of scaffolding. Doing the assignment yourself first-a practice I like to call dogfooding -will also help you identify flaws in the assignment that can be tweaked before you hand it over to students.

It's certainly possible for students to collect resources through non-digital means, by reading books in the library or curating physical artifacts or objects, but doing a curation project digitally allows for media-rich collections that can be found and assembled in a fraction of the time. And if you have students curating in groups, using digital tools will allow them to collaborate from home without having to meet in person.

Here are a few curation tools that would work beautifully for this kind of project:

Elink is the tool featured in the sample project above. Of all the tools suggested here, this one is the simplest. You collect your links, write descriptions, and end up with a single unique web page that you can share with anyone.

Pinterest is probably the most popular curation tool out there. If your students are already using Pinterest, or you're willing to get them started, you could have them create a Pinterest board as a curation assignment.

Symbaloo allows users to create "webmixes," boards of icons that each lead to different URLs. Although it would be possible to create a curated collection with Symbaloo, it doesn't allow for the same amount of writing that some other tools do, so you would need to have students do their writing on a separate document.

Diigo is a good choice for a more text-driven project, like a literature review or a general collection of resources at the beginning stages of a research project, where images aren't necessarily required. Diigo offers lots of space to take notes about every item in a collection, but it doesn't have user-friendly supports for images or other media.

I'm so excited about all the different ways we can use curation in the classroom, and I would love to hear your ideas as well. Please share them in the comments below. If you have links to student samples, share those, too! ♦

Curation is just one of the modules in JumpStart, my new online technology course created especially for educators. I thought carefully about what specific skills teachers need to make the most of classroom tech, chose 9 of them, and designed hands-on projects that will show you exactly how to use them.

If you're ready to take your tech skills from so-so to rock solid, this course will change everything for you.

Learn more about the course here.

There's more where this came from.
Join my mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration-in quick, bite-sized packages-all geared toward making your teaching more effective and fun. To thank you, I'll send you a free copy of my e-booklet, 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half. I look forward to getting to know you better!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
To Boost Higher-Order Thinking, Try Curation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A digital curation project is a fast way to engage critical thinking in any content area. Here's how it works.