Educational Enhancement

flickr photo by catspyjamasnz shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license

Students have access to unprecedented amounts of information online and need to move beyond consumption to more critical, organised and productive use of digital materials, tools and platforms.

In this post I will be suggesting that ‘content curation’ activities that involve ‘sorting through the vast amounts of content on the web and presenting it in a meaningful and organized way around a specific theme’ can be used to develop critical thinking and digital capabilities. Learners involved in content curation go beyond searching for information to evaluating what they find, sharing with peers and commenting on their discoveries. It can also be the beginning of a Personal/Professional Learning Network (PLN) that will sustain someone throughout their career. We should not forget, however, that curation also has another important role to play in the field of digital preservation. This is generally referred to as ‘digital curation’ which  ‘involves maintaining, preserving and adding value to digital research data throughout its lifecycle’ (Digital Curation Centre). It is becoming increasingly important to think about how materials which are ‘born digital’ can be preserved against a backdrop of redundant formats and disappearing platforms. Read more ›