9. Weapons of Individual Transformation: Content Curation Tools
By: Robin Good
Tags: Curation, Future, Education, Learning, Journalism

9. Weapons of Individual Transformation: Content Curation Tools

10 Disruptive Factors Transforming the World of Education and Learning — Consequences, Opportunities, Tools

“We have access to an exponentially growing amount of information to process and apply [and] there are many excellent tools we can all use to help in constructing and organizing that content.” Sam Gliksman

http://ipadeducators.ning.com/profiles/blogs/supplementing-textbooks

Startups have smelled the opportunity of a continuously growing multi-billion dollar business and they are not sleeping on it.

Hundreds of these startups are already investing their best energies and resources in launching, developing or improving upon digital curation tools of one kind or another.

If in just a five-year period we have gone from a handful of curation tools (Pinterest, Delicious, and a few others) to hundreds of alternative choices, there must be a reason. Or more than one.

Reason one: Abundance of information. When there is excess quantity or over-abundance of any resource, then filtering and selecting becomes highly valuable.

From Yahoo (curated) to Google (search), from Google to curation again, this is the age of “trusted guides”. Trustworthy subject-matter expert individuals that you can put a name on.

Reason two: We like to trust humans we know and respect, not secret algorithms. Search is a wild guess. You always need to go and check each and every result suggested. Curated collections (the serious ones, not the ones created by 99% of content marketers today) are one stop-shops. They are true time-savers. They are characterized by one or more trusted, experienced persons who have taken on the task of continuously finding, gathering, vetting and presenting the best resources for a specific need / interest / problem. These collections are still a rare thing to find today, but once this phase where curation is promoted as a second-class time-saving smartass-content-production-strategy, you will be amazed. (Google itself will greatly benefit from this, as it increasingly relies on such curated results.)

Reason three: The technology is here. The only problem for now is that it has been too much in the hands of eager entrepreneurs moved by profits more than purpose and too little by educators, journalists, librarians and passionate amateurs who are the true movers of this revolution.

Tools, languages, protocols to capture, record, store, organize and publish curated collections are all available and mature and need only better design thinking to be properly developed.

Specialized content curation tools are now available to everyone wanting to curate specific content. Here a few examples:

And I could go on.

What characterizes all of these curation tools, is their ability to:

a) capture, excerpt or clip a small portion of an original information artifact (be it text, image, music, video, etc.).

b) facilitate its organized archival inside a stream, category system or folksonomy of some kind.

c) showcase items in the collection in a personalized fashion, while providing the ability to add value to them.

d) publish, share and distribute such curated content across multiple online channels (website / blog, Facebook, Twitter, other social media, RSS feed, email newsletter, etc.).