Part one – 12 resources to discover and curate digital curriculum for teachers and students

Michael Gorman briefly looks back at using textbooks where he started his teaching career 35 years ago and what has since changed.

I first started my teaching career close to 35 years ago the textbook was not only the curriculum, it was also the center of learning. I was able to curate by finding an occasional article, ordering a 16 mm film several weeks in advance, finding a filmstrip with its exciting beeps between slides, and an occasional field trip.

He reviews a number of tools starting with Symbaloo and Diigo

 

The list in full

 

Webinhalte kuratieren als Lernszenario: viele Werkzeuge, wenige Beispiele

Christoph Meier recently decided to experiment with social content curation and describes his experiences

In essence, it is about finding content, select, contextualize, organize, publish and to get people talking.

He mentions the importance of visual representation and provides a range of links to open resources including the German Digital Library via a scoop-it page.

He would be very interested in receiving thoughts and tips on the value of curating content both as teachers and learners and whether there are possibilities for developing criteria about the resources as information for other learners?

In full, English

I’m not a curator

Marco Arment refers to a Curator’s Code which has been created as an attempt to develop understanding and standardize attribution and linking.  He believes that there are issues beyond using a common online syntax including aggregation, over-quoting and re-writing. He looks at the value of sharing links and where attribution is relevant.

In full

The 21st Century Curator

Sahana refers to Harold Jarche’s presentation ‘Network’ and reflects on how curation has become a buzzword where she has noticed that one post in five refers to it. She reviews several articles and posts on curation

A little reflection reveals that curation is a way of life for all of us—we are all curators. How we put our curation skills to use is what makes us unique. We are curating when we pick the books that will adorn our shelves; we are curating when we choose our furniture; the store keeper is curating when s/he selects and arranges the display. We are also curating when we choose what to share with our Facebook friends. And in each type of curation, what comes across are unique perspectives, a sense of pattern and a representation the curator wants the world to see

In full

Connecting, Sharing and Curating

by Keith Lyons

The New Year has prompted a range of posts about trends in connecting, sharing and curating.

Some examples I have found in the last few days:

Stephen Downes linked to Nick DeNardis’s post Why now is a great time to do an OAuth audit. Nick points out that “The beginning of the year is a great opportunity to start fresh and look at everything with a new set of eyes. Something that is easily overlooked is who (or what) has access to your social media accounts. It’s easy to change your password and revoke access from co-workers but it isn’t as easy to identify which websites and services have access to your accounts.”

Alistair Gray shared a link with the International Sports Management LinkedIn Group to a Dan Schawbel discussion of optimising use of LinkedIn. Dan identifies two fundamental principles of networking in his conversation with Jan Vermeiren, the founder of Networking Coach: the networking attitude (give and receive); and the Know, Like, Trust factor.

A Diigo Teacher-Librarian Group link from a Scoop.it page to an Apollo Research Institute Report (April 2011) on Future Work Skills. The Report identified ten skills “vital for success in the workforce”:

• Sense-making: an ability to determine the deeper meaning or significance of what is being expressed
• Social intelligence: an ability to connect to others in a deep and direct way, to sense and stimulate reactions and desired interactions
• Novel and adaptive thinking: a proficiency at thinking and coming up with solutions and responses beyond that which is rote or rule-based
• Cross-cultural competency: an ability to operate in different cultural settings
• Computational thinking: an ability to translate vast amounts of data into abstract concepts and to understand data-based reasoning
• New media literacy: an ability to assess critically and develop content that uses new media forms, and to leverage these media for persuasive communication
• Transdisciplinarity: literacy in and ability to understand concepts across multiple disciplines
• Design mindset: an ability to represent and develop tasks and work processes for desired outcomes
• Cognitive load management: an ability to discriminate and filter information for importance, and to understand how to maximize cognitive functioning using a variety of tools and techniques
• Virtual collaboration: an ability to work productively, drive engagement, and demonstrate presence as a member of a virtual team

Robin Good observes that:

By looking at the set of emerging skills that this research identifies as vital for future workers, I can’t avoid but recognize the very skillset needed by any professional curator or newsmaster.

This week’s presenter in the #change11 MOOC, Howard Rheingold has discussed five essential literacies:

I’ve concluded that one important step that people can take is to become more adept at five essential literacies for a world of mobile, social, and always-on media: attention, crap detection, participation, collaboration, and network know-how. The effects of these literacies can both empower the individuals who master them and improve the quality of the digital culture commons.

Stephen Downes shared a great link to Alec Couros’s end of year Social Media and Open Education blog post about student work. Alec notes that:

I wanted to use the last post of the year to share a few examples of the great work that is being done by my graduate and undergraduate students. I am so very fortunate to have creative & hard-working students who are committed to improving their knowledge of teaching and learning in light of our new digital landscape. I hope that some of these examples will inspire you to take up new challenges in your own context.

These examples included student projects using: stop-motion technique; Glogster; Freemind; Xtranormal; Screenr; Jing; Voicethread; TikaTok; Prezi; and Knovio.

SlideShare compiled 12 presentations that look at change in 2012. I was particularly interested in Skytide’s 7 Online Video Trends to Watch in 2012 and the discussion of Adaptive Bitrate Streaming. Skytide suggest “As adoption of adaptive bitrate protocols grows, providers of legacy streaming methods will find themselves under increased pressure to prove their added value. Witness the recent decision by Adobe to cease further development of its mobile FlashPlayer.”

I noted from an iSportConnect alert that the Philadelphia Wings Lacrosse team is using Twitter handles on its shirts (and following on a lead from two football teams (Valencia and Jaguares de Chiapas). Whilst looking at the Twitter possibilities I saw the Twitter blog post about New Year’s Eve activity. The post includes a video visualisation of tweets.

Phil Davis has written a post for The Scholarly Kitchen, Tweets and Our Obsession with Alt Metrics, that offers another perspective on tweeting. He discusses Gunther Eysenbach’s paper in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR), Can tweets predict citations? Metrics of social impact based on twitter and correlation with traditional metrics of scientific impact. The comments on this post make for fascinating reading and raise some salutary issues for me about connecting, sharing and curating.

I thought I would end this post with a link to Tagxedo. It is a word cloud generator and I have used it here to summarise the content of this post.

Photo Credits

Connecting

Share Your Ideas

Librarian Action Figure