21st Century Tools for Teaching-People and Learners

Robin Good: What does curation mean from an educational viewpoint? And what is the key difference between "collecting" and "curating".

Nancy White (@NancyW), a 21st Century Learning & Innovation Specialist and the author of Innovations in Education blog, has written an excellent article, dissecting the key characterizing traits of curation, as a valuable resource to create and share knowledge. 

She truly distills some key traits of curation in a way that is clear and comprehensible to anyone.

She writes: "The first thing I realized is that in order to have value-added benefits to curating information, the collector needs to move beyond just classifying the objects under a certain theme to deeper thinking through a) synthesis and b) evaluation of the collected items.

How are they connected?"

Excellent definition. 

And then she also frames perfectly the relevance of "context" for any meaningful curation project by writing: "I believe when we curate, organization moves beyond thematic to contextual – as we start to build knowledge and understanding with each new resource that we curate.

Themes have a common unifying element – but don’t necessarily explain the “why.”

Theme supports a central idea – Context allows the learner to determine why that idea (or in this case, resource) is important.

So, as collecting progresses into curating, context becomes essential to determine what to keep, and what to discard."

But there's a lot more insight distilled in this article as Nancy captures with elegance the difference between collecting for a personal interest and curating for a specific audience. 

She finally steals my full endorsement for this article by discretely inquirying how great a value it would be to allow students to "curate" the domains of interest they need to master.

Excellent. Highly recommended. 9/10

Full article: http://d20innovation.d20blogs.org/2012/07/07/understanding-content-curation/ ;

"Google Earth was one of the very first pieces of software that I began to create educational resources with. As I put it in one of my first ever blog posts 5 years ago: ”This app won me over straight away.” The engaging environment really struck a chord with me and I remember fondly my first forays into using it to support learning. It has developed so much over the years...."

Robin Good: Course Hero is a platform which allows the creation and delivery of online video courses curated from the best existing published content on that topic.

There are already ready-made courses to access or you can submit a topic that you would like to video-curate into a course.

"You can learn just about anything from YouTube...if you're willing to dig through millions of videos."

From Techcrunch: "Luckily, Course Hero has done the work for you, offering coherent classes by hosting collections of the best educational YouTube videos and other content.

The newly launched courses section of the eduTech startup’s site now has classes in entrepreneurship, business plan development, and programming in a variety of languages.

...

By drawing from YouTube and other openly available education, Course Hero plans to set up courses for anything it, or you, can think of.

...

Each course breaks down into roughly 6 chapters of 6 concept YouTube videos, Justin.tv videos, articles, and more. Unlike Udemy‘s one-teacher-per-class approach, Course Hero courses are compiled from content by many teachers.

Rather than put you at the mercy of long-winded professors, Course Hero trims videos and articles down to their most important teachings.

Along the way you’ll answer quiz questions, take tests to complete chapters, and face a final exam to finish a course and earn proficiency badges..."

Full article: http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/12/course-hero/ ;

Courses: http://www.coursehero.com/courses/ ;

More info: http://www.coursehero.com/ ;