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.