Curationis about organizing, editing, and bringing order from chaos. How does thisapply to online content for eLearning? As LearningSolutions Magazine columnist Marc Rosenberg says,“There’s a lot of stuff out there” on the web. Content curation aims to siftout the valuable content and present it to learners in a meaningful way. Putanother way, curation is filtering out the information that you, yourorganization, or your learners need in order to accomplish a specific goal.Content curation can also mean, in the “museum curator” sense of the word,tending to a collection of content items to ensure that it stays relevant andcurrent.
Whatany of that means specifically depends on your organization, your audience, andyour goals.
The Internet,as NYU journalism professor and Internet communications expert Clay Shirkysays, represents not an information overload so much as a filter failure. When the printingpress was invented, publishers were responsible for filtering. If theypublished books that did not sell, they paid the cost. That cost has all butdisappeared; anyone can publish information at virtually no cost. Therefore,the Internet has a vast amount of inaccurate, inappropriate (for your needs),irrelevant, or just plain bad content. It also has many gems of information;the trick is finding them among the mass of content.
Howdoes curation apply to eLearning?
Focuson finding those gems.
TheeLearning Guild’s program director, David Kelly, saysthat to be effective curators for their organizations, “learning andperformance professionals need to discover where information is being shared intheir organizations and tap into it.”
Headds, “Curation is less about the quantity of resources than the quality ofresources.”
In an eLearning context, curation mightinclude:
- Connecting learners with existing educational and training resources, both within and outside the organization, and filtering out the irrelevant, inaccurate, or poor-quality resources
- Facilitating resource sharing, where learning professionals and learners alike find resources and build reference “libraries”—which can be as simple as a communal web page—to share what they find with co-workers and fellow learners
- Creating and sharing networks of employees who are interested in and learning about the same topics
- Identifying trends—in topics discussed and information or training sought by members of an organization or workplace—and using that information to curate relevant learning opportunities and share pertinent resources
- Combining elements of unrelated resources or content to create training or new content that is useful to learners in an organization
- Adding value to content—not only selecting the most relevant resources, but also enriching them with comments, insights, suggestions, or even links to other content
