Dispatch from the Digital Frontier: Digital Dust Bunnies

Formany of us, the end of the year is a time to take stock of one’slife. It’s also, for me, the time when I weed my drawers and filesof unneeded contents. That job has gotten more complicated over theyears, since so much of what I hold on to is in digital form.

Howis it that digital files have become like so many digital dustbunnies, multiplying and gathering lint? All those documents andemails that might be useful one day, cluttering my digitalenvironment and taking up space on a hard drive – how do I decidewhat to eliminate? And if I keep a file, where do I put it so thatI’ll remember about it and can find it when that eventual, possibleuse arises?

AsI’ve been grappling with these weighty questions, I’ve wonderedwhat the extent of my digital consumption and production is. How muchdata does one life generate? Terabytes? Petabytes?? (Do I even havevocabulary to describe the volume of bytes that encapsulate my life?)How much data are generated by seven billion people and theircommercial, educational, medical and entertainment activities?

IDC(in partnership with EMC Corporation) has been gathering data aboutdata since 2007, which is summarized in a report called, “A DigitalUniverse Decade – Are You Ready?” (https://bit.ly/LDY9H).Turns out, the universe is expanding. Last year alone, reportsIDC, digital content weighed in at nearly 800,000 petabytes (for therecord, a petabyte equals a million gigabytes). This year, we’reexpected to hit 1.2 zettabytes (new vocabulary word for me!), or 1.2million petabytes. And if that didn’t knock your socks off, get aload of this: by 2020, the volume will increase to 35 zettabytes. Inother words, approximately 29 times the amount of data that existstoday will be generated over the next ten years.

Whereis this data tsunami coming from? Social networking will account formuch of the new content. Right now, according to Time.com, 135,849photos are added to Facebook every 60 seconds, about 100 million eachday. Zynga, a social game developer, currently has over 360 millionactive users generating new virtual farms and restaurants and mafiawars. Each minute, 24 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube. WhileTwitter statistics are hard to nail down, it seems that theapproximately 200 million users are generating about 100 milliontweets each day. In 2009, Radicati Group (www.radicati.com)estimated that, globally, 247 billion corporateand personal email messages were generated daily – 2.8 million emailsevery second, with 80% of those being spam and viruses. And wehaven’t even considered the data generated by corporations,universities, governments and research institutions.

Howwill we know what’s useful and relevant? How will we find it andaccess it? With so many content sources, some known but most unknown,how will we understand what content is reliable, what content sourcesare trustworthy, what interpretation is accurate?

Entercontent curation, a practice of aggregation, synthesis, analysis,interpretation and reporting. Content curation comes in many forms,from “Top 100” or “Best of…” lists to news aggregation andanalysis services like Newsy.com. A soon-to-be-released (it’s inpublic alpha now) search engine called Qwiki seeks to provide a new“information experience” by aggregating images and adding briefcommentary in response to search queries.

Noneof these examples provides new information (original reporting, asit’s called in journalism), but rely instead on the first-lineinvestigation of others. The value the curator provides is conductingthe legwork of gathering the original work of others, and thencompiling that work into a single content package with analysis orrecommendations.

Curationis a long-standing practice. Museums are the obvious example, wherethose knowledgeable about a particular topic pull collections ofartifacts together into a single display and offer commentary andcritique of the collection. Through this collecting, analysis andinterpretation, new meanings can be derived for each individualartifact and for the collection as a whole.

Aseducators, we, too, are increasingly in the business of curation, butwith a unique twist. In developing elearning content, we compile dataand resources, sift out the information that is most relevant to ourlearners and their learning and performance needs, and re-package itall in the right digital format. But our learners don’t just loveus for our curation services. They also love us for our curationservices about curation. In other words, when we’re doing our jobreally well, we’re teaching our learners how to be their owncurators. We’re teaching our learners how to learn.

Withthe stunning volume of information that everyone will be sortingthrough on our way to that 35 zettabyte milestone, the role ofeducator cumcurator will be ever more important. We may have to re-think how weposition ourselves in the coming era, but the job of learning contentcurator will be vital to our collective future.

Now,has anyone seen the vacuum? Those digital dust bunnies justmultiplied again…