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Students as Curators

Page history last edited by fr3dt3ch 12 years, 2 months ago

From the mosh pit to the museum: students as digital curators represents the concept of students taking control of the information they need. It’s the idea of going from the “mosh pit” of searching the Internet to the “museum” of carefully selected resources. Students can be curators of information through gathering (“aggregating”) digital resources they have evaluated and collecting them within one of a variety of web tools.

click the image at left to view my presentation using Themeefy, one of the curation tools.

Definition:

“Content curation is the act of continually identifying, selecting and sharing the best and most relevant online content and other online resources (and by that I mean articles, blog posts, videos, photos, tools, tweets, or whatever) on a specific subject to match the needs of a specific audience.” –Ann Handley, Top Rank blog

Rationale:

I see content curation as a way for students to develop various 21st century skills: locating, filtering, evaluating, and ranking content; organizing, sorting, and creating content.

“…a learner that pulls in information from many different sources and media at once, reflects on the information, and then creates new content based on that information that is then shared with other learners in an interactive way that often allows those learners to also learn and create… It means using everything at your disposal to create something new in the discipline.” -A Wandering Eyre http://wanderingeyre.com/2011/09/01/curating-the-a-new-learning-experience/

Application:

Simple fact-finding activities don’t engage higher-level thinking skills. Have students find and evaluate digital resources related to a topic instead. Part of the evaluation criteria should include whether or not a resource provides a pre-determined set of information. Once those resources are gathered, research could be done using those curated resources. The benefit is that you know students are using reliable information.

Examples: (from http://fusionfinds.wordpress.com/2011/12/06/content-curation-classroom-applications/)

Book Report: Collect online content related to the book with the purpose of “selling” it to you audience.
Glossary: Define terms for the current unit study using a variety of media.
Current Events: Students create a collection to reflect the 5 most important events of the week.
Introduce a New Topic: A collection to introduce a new topic of study and peak the student’s interest.
Identify Trends: Select a trend in fashion, entertainment, politics, business, etc, to explain with a collection.
Puzzle: Which of the things doesn’t belog here? How are all these items related? What historical character is represented here?
Historical Event: Create an exhibit of a historical event with a variety of media including primary documents.
Expert Tips: Students create a guide filled with expert tips on a topic related to the current unit.
How-to: A collection that demonstrates how to do something such as help endangered species.
Character Analysis: Choose character of literature, history, or current events to create a collection around. What would be in Alice’s collection?
Statistics, Data, Graphs: A collection of data on a specific topic.
Research: As a part of a larger project, students collect their research in a as Scoop.it topic for easy reference and documentation of sources.
About Me: As a team builder, have students create collections that reflect themselves.