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Tag: curate

  • Accessing Curated Content – Experimenting with Rise

    A question I have about content curation in an organisational setting is:

    How do you make the content available for people within an organisation?

    I guess you could use the LMS but I don’t know user-friendly this would be especially if you need to sign-in to get to it. Maybe an intranet or other website? I’ve been playing around with Anders Pink and from what I’ve seen, it’s a useful tool for curation for individuals and teams. I’ll write a post about it in the future.

    Another idea was to use one of the new apps in Articulate 360 called Rise so I thought I’d try it out. Rise won’t curate the content for you but if you’ve already done the curation you can add your content and then make it available to people via a link. Content can be added or removed easily and it’s responsive so it works well on mobile devices too.

    I decided to try it out by creating a simple demo using some resources from my Continuing with Content Curation blog post. Click on the image to access and let me know what you think:

    Rise example

    If you know of or have used any tools for distributing curated content, I’d be most interested to hear about them and your experience.

  • Continuing with Content Curation

    Since my last post on curating content, I’ve been keeping an eye out for articles and posts that discuss this topic especially for L&D folks. Generally speaking I find that lots of people are saying that curation will be a required skill for L&D but these same people are either not practicing curators or getting into the detail of how to curate content.

    One of the challenges I can see regarding content curation is finding ‘quality’ content in a sea of information. With such a huge volume you can’t be across everything but maybe that’s ok? Then what about sub-categories of content? As an example, in eLearning there’s content about authoring tools, learning theory, accessibility, graphic design, writing and many more.

    So some questions I’ve been thinking about are:

    Can the curated content be a mixed bag that falls under a common theme or is it better to sort by a category? For example eLearning or something more specific such as learning theory?

    How do you keep track of content you find from different sources?

    What tools are there to help with curating?

    How do you build skills in curation? (I’m taking the jump in and give it a go approach).

    Here’s my attempt at curating some content about content curation. The reason for selecting these particular posts was that they provide some diverse perspectives into content curation as well as a couple of examples of curated content (click the title to view).

    A Framework for Content Curation by Ryan Tracey

    In this post, Ryan proposes a practical framework for curating content. Built upon Tell me, Show me, Let me, Test me and focusing on quality being more important than quantity. The comments section is also a good read.

    We are the Curators of the Learning Revolution by Ruth McElhone

    As learning and development professionals move towards being curators in a world where there’s ample information, this post provides three good starting points for content curation.

    Seven Approaches to Content Curation by Marc Rosenberg

    I hadn’t thought of different approaches to curation until I read this post where Marc describes seven different approaches to curating content. Keep an eye out for Marc’s other articles on the topic.

    Content Curation for Learning by Anders Pink

    This is a FREE eBook from the folks at Anders Pink all about curation – why curation matters, the role of learning professionals in curation, examples and more.

    Content Curation, How can it be used? by Lorraine Minister

    Lorraine commented below and left a link to a post that describes a model she developed about different levels of content curation.

    eLearning Guild Twist

    A carefully selected list of articles on a variety of L&D topics for the Guild’s community that comes out every week. In my opinion a good example of content curation.

    A Week in Review by David Anderson

    Another example of curation, each week David gathers links to demos, discussions, articles and more that all come from the E-Learning Heroes Community.

    Pick of the Posts by Jane Hart

    Jane does a monthly curated post but hers is focused around a particular topic area. For the month of August it was posts about social learning.

    deathtostock_wired6

  • Getting Started with Curating Content

    Art Gallery

    Curation. Whenever I hear the term I always think of a person working in an art gallery carefully selecting pieces of work for an upcoming exhibition. But I’m also seeing it as a skill needed for modern L&D folks…

    “We need curators and community managers, rather than course designers” Charles Jennings

    …and certainly it’s an area (along with community management) that I want to explore more and build my own capability in. But how can I do this?

    What is curation?

    The starting point in wanting to learn more about how to do something is to know what it means. So here’s a couple definitions that I found online:

    “Curation isn’t just about collecting or filtering…it’s about adding value through context and analysis” David Kelly

    “A Content Curator is someone who continually finds, groups, organizes and shares the best and most relevant content on a specific issue online” Rohit Bhargava

    I thought that I was curating already by selecting some of the articles/videos/blog posts that I come across and sharing them via social media e.g. Twitter, LinkedIn but the comments above suggest that it’s more than this. Ok, I’ll give this a go by adding some curated resources at the end of my blog posts that ties in with the topic of the post.

    I feel comfortable in attempting to curate content within the eLearning space as it’s an area that I have experience in and being active in SoMe means that I’m exposed to lots of information in the field plus people who I interact with online.

    But if curation is a skill needed by L&D professionals, a big question for me is:

    How do I curate content outside of my area of expertise?

    As an example, if right now I was working in an L&D department within an organisation, I might need to curate some resources for managers to develop their capability for managing people. How can I do this effectively when 1) I haven’t managed staff myself for a long time and 2) I’m not actively across what’s available out there. How can I tell the ‘wheat from the chaff’ in terms of curating resources for them when (from my point of view) I’m not in a position of credibility?

    One of my pet peeves is that in a number of posts/articles etc. that I read about the ‘future of L&D’ is that they often just focus on what L&D should be doing but provide little to no guidance on the how. It’s easy to say “L&D need to be content curators” but it seems like there’s more to it than pulling a few resources together.

    Generally speaking, for the L&D people I come into contact with, the field is very much entrenched in the course mindset which are one-off learning events that are expected to bring about change. I see content curation as being more ongoing but will require a huge mindset shift from developing courses.

    I’m keen to learn more about the practical, the doing, the how of curation as well as how do we get there. Do you curate? If so, how do you do it? Please let me know your thoughts/ideas/advice in the comments below and if you have any examples of curated content, let me know too.

    I did come across this example of curated content about curation by David Kelly which I thought was a good one because there’s lots of articles on the subject:

    Curation: Beyond the Buzzword