Learning 2013: Breakout Session 581: Curation in Collaborative Learning

The first session of the 2nd day of Learning 2013 focused on curating learning content to ensure that it was current and what was needed at the time of need. The discussion centered around what “curation” meant in today’s social world. The question arose whether curation is the same as knowledge management and whether both are the same as learning. It was suggested that curation is a native brain function.

We then discussed the basic tasks involved in curation and we determined that it was sequentially:

1. Collection
2. Saving/Bookmarking
3. Add content
4. Sharing

The presenters – Allison Anderson and Armando Torres of Intel – presented a couple of tools used for curation in collaborative learning:

• Pintarest
• Scoop.it

Both are social bookmarking sites with a graphical interface, which led me to wonder what is the usage of Delicious and its text based format?

Scoop.it works as follows: once you log-in it prompts you to create a category and then makes recommendations for you based on key words. You can use the “scoop it!” button next to the suggestion to add it to your collection. You can also use a bookmarklet placed on your bookmark bar to capture items for Scoop.it.

Pinterest works as follows, enter a searh – in this example “epub” and the results are shown in picture format.:

Compared to Delicious’ text based interface which is text based and relies on users to enter descriptive text of the link, which, as shown below, seems to rarely occur.

Learning 2013: Breakout Session 371: Come Joinng the Crowd! Using Crowdsourcing to Design Learning Activities

This was one of the sessions hosted by a cadre from the 30 Under 30 Program. The way to crowd source to build a learning solution is a three-step process.

1. Brainstorm the items requiring performance support of some fashion.
2. Ask questions about what issues might arise or be encountered.
3. Provide answers to those questions.

Typically, the process is done virtually over the course of days or weeks. The presenters recommended the use of a cloud application such as Hackpad or Google Docs in which people can view real time edits can return at other times for asynchronous edits.

Learning 2013 - Breakout Session 274 - Is Bite Size the Right Size? Smaller Learning, a Closer Look

This session focused on how to respond  to corporate pressure to reduce training times. The presenters -Camille Price, of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu and Cary Harlow, of Hewlett Packard - said the conversation should not just be about compressing training, but challenging the assumption that compression is possible at all.

Once participant in the audience suggested that one way to reduce training time is to shift to prework, but in my own mind the question arises as to whether the company will expect the student to do the prework on his or her own time rather than on corporate time since the push to compress training time is the predicated on the desire to reduce the time the student is away from his primary tasks.

The suggestion from the presenters was to guide an evaluation of existing traing to break it up into primary, secondary, and tertiary training and to formulate it in a lattice framework for everyone to see so they ca decide where and when to take it.

Terms/topics to look up:

• Elaborative Learning Theory

Learning 2013 - Breakout Session 101 - Living Online: The Internet's Impact on Human Memory, Decision Making, Creativity & Communication

The first session I attended at Learning 2013 was a Q&A session by Betsy Sparrow regarding living online. Sparrow is an assistant professor at Columbia University's Psychology Department. She initially was not my first choice for the 8:00 am, Monday session. I chose at the last minute to attend her session was due to her comments at the Sunday night opening session when she was interviewed by Elliott Masie and she commented that we are now focusing on where to find information online rather than remember the knowledge itself.

At her Monday morning session her question to the participants was "Should simple tasks be delegated to look-up learning?" And, as a result of this delegation are we losing our memory of simple things. Trans-active memory gives away control of remembering things to our appliances and the internet. That memory then assumes a belief and a trust that the sites we are turning to are reputable and not willing to mislead us. These sites may be moderated by experts or crowd-sourced.

Belief is the key and if trust in a site or organization is squandered the people looking for information will go elsewhere. So sites cannot stagnate, they must constantly review their content to ensure it is valid and relevant.

Key term learned: Agency: You have control over your learning.