Basics

Content Curation lernOS Circle Guide

A guide on how to find, make sense of, and share relevant content

You have no idea what content curation (or also called "digital content curation") is and would like to get a picture of it?

Content curation helps you put together valuable information about topics with the help of content and experts, without having to reinvent the wheel. You'll learn methods, forms, and approaches for thinking outside the box about your topic and sharing your emerging knowledge with others.

When you learn about content curation through this lernOS Circle Guide, you will learn about the mechanisms and differences between machine filters (via algorithms) and human filters. But you'll also learn to use curation for yourself and your life: to work more openly and visibly, and to learn to cope with the flood of available knowledge, help others, save time, and understand things. Along the way, you'll gain reputation and expertise, within your organization or in your network. You will learn that networks based on trust are the key to cope with our complex world and to learn and innovate quickly and effectively.

If you want more details to help you decide if the Content Curation guide is right for you, listen to Stefan`s podcast on Content Curation -- it will definitely help you gain some insights into the topic and decide if you want to spend the next 13 weeks more intensively involved in Content Curation.

The podcast (German) with Christoph Haffner and Thomas Jenewein from the SAP Education Newscast on content curation in the context of the Learntec trade fair 2020 - the episode lasts approx. 52 minutes. - (accessed on 13.10.2020)

Basics

If you are thinking about doing this Circle, it is best to take a look at the following basics we have put together for you.

  • What is curation?

  • How can one define curating?

  • Why curate?

  • What characterizes curators?

  • How does curation work?

What is curation? You can get a first insight via the video Stefan recorded at a meetup of the Colearn Community Munich #clc089:\ ["Content Curation" by Stefan Diepolder at the meetup of the https://youtu.be/rn_AQuUxxIk (German)

How can one define curating?

Origin of the word "curare" [in Wikipedia], https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/curare#:~:text=(transitive%2C%20medicine)%20to%20treat,patient%2C%20disease%2C%20etc.), accessed on 28.07.2023)

Latin "curare" means, among other things.

...care...

...provide...

...take the trouble...

...Feel like it...

There is no universal definition of content curation, but for us this short summary, adapted from Robin Good, defines very well what it is all about:

"Content curation is the art of finding, filtering, organizing, and adding value to digital information building blocks and artifacts on a specific topic for a specific audience interest and making them publicly available."

Robin Good: What is Content Curation? (accessed on 16.06.2020)

Curation is not just the idea of a few Internet-savvy freaks. Even if they are often not called that, the skills of curators belong to the core competencies of the 21st century, as the Mozilla Foundation, for example, has worked out.

Curation skills such as share, compose, remix, evaluate, synthesize, search, connect, contribute are among the 21st Century Skills promoted by the Mozilla Foundation in Web Literacy. If you go to the pages, you can go through curated learning paths on each skill. 

web lit map

Figure: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/initiatives/web-literacy/ (CC BY 4.0)

Why curate?

Our problem today is no longer the lack of information, as it used to be, but the lack of reliable and efficient filters. Professor Clay Shirky expresses this very clearly.

"It`s not information overload. It`s filter failure."

Source: Clay Shirky. AZQuotes.com, [Wind and Fly LTD], 2020. https://www.azquotes.com/quote/409865, accessed on 18.06.2020.  

He explains the Information Overload in 3 minutes on Youtube.

The world we live in today is characterized by abundance. To cope with abundance, effective filters are necessary. No matter where we look, the first decisions are taken from us everywhere, whether we like it or not. Our Google home page, the gateway to the world's largest library, knows and remembers our preferences and search history down to the last detail -- and suggests to us, optimized and filtered by algorithms, what should interest us most in our search.

If you want to go a little deeper - the video "Beware of the Online Filter Bubbles" by Eli Pariser describes how this mechanism works (09:05 minutes)

We go to a supermarket -- and find the eye-level products that supermarket owners think we should buy -- and not the products we actually want, such as particularly low-priced or sustainable, locally produced products. And, and, and.... Let's be aware - we live in a world that is shaped by abundance and filtered and curated for us -- and where many choices and possibilities are already anticipated by technical systems or people.

Music is a good example here, especially for the diversity and abundance in our world today: In the 17th century, music was still something very special. It could only be enjoyed live and only a very few rich and famous people had access to it. Then, starting in the 19th century, technical devices were invented to make music playable, from the first gramophones, record players, cassette and CD players to the invention of the mp3 format and thus the digitization of music. In the meantime, everyone can have their personal music on their smartphone with them wherever they go, often aggregated from powerful portals like YouTube, Spotify or iTunes. We find all kinds of music styles from every corner of the world and very quickly we are overwhelmed with the abundance of possibilities. To counter this, the music portals use recommendations calculated by algorithms, enable the exchange and recommendations among friends, for example, also provide their own filtered offers and playlists.

And when it comes to knowledge, information and content, it's even more extreme, because knowledge grows exponentially. As the figure below shows, knowledge doubled every 13 months in 2017, with a trend toward "much faster". Contributing to this, for example, are simple systems and devices that are easy and quick for anyone to use by anyone and can be shared via portals and social media at lightning speed and many times over. Keeping a good overview, being able to separate the wheat from the chaff, is more important than ever.

Visualization by Katrin Mäntele \@kleinerw4hnsinn (CC BY)

Source: Knowledge Doubling Curve, aus: https://www.valamis.com/blog/why-do-we-spend-all-that-time-searching-for-information-at-work, accessed on 17.06.2020

So we rely heavily on curation, and especially in the digital world, it surrounds and influences us constantly, often without us being consciously aware of it. That's why we think it's important to look at curation and its mechanisms.

What characterizes curators?

Curators create and design a space, arrange the artifacts they have selected and filtered, and thereby give them a new, individual value. For example, a curator of an art exhibition. A content curator learns incredibly quickly and efficiently by intensively exploring topics, immersing himself with topics, immerses himself/herself, filters and orders, curates him/herself. Especially the process of enrichment or sensemaking, in which one deals intensively with the collected content, validates it, questions it and creates something new, such as a blog post, a podcast or a video from it, initiates an efficient and intensive learning process and helps to be able to make good and well-founded decisions.

Good curators know their audience and their needs and interests. They are very well connected, both with their target group (the so-called "tribe") and with knowledge carriers and thought leaders who are relevant to "their" topic. They think and work much like investigative journalists who work diligently and meticulously to find, filter, and collect the best content nuggets. They take care of their audience by providing them with their best sources and adding personal value to them, giving their audience a reason to engage with the content or topic.

Visualization by Katrin Mäntele \@kleinerw4hnsinn (CC BY)

How does curation work?

Content curation, as it is used in many areas today, has emerged from the overabundance of information, some of which is difficult to assess and relate. It reflects the need to find relevant information, filter it, record it, check it for facts and truthfulness, and then enrich it and create points of connection to existing knowledge.

One possible approach to these steps is a three-step process according to Harold Jarche (2014) (https://jarche.com/2014/02/the-seek-sense-share-framework/) that addresses:

  1. is concerned with searching for or finding content, information, and

experts deals,

  1. the filtering and organizing and in the further, important step

then enriching this content with value and opinions,

  1. and finally the possibilities of sharing and exchanging.

{width="6.33333552055993in" height="3.5520833333333335in"}Visualization by Katrin Mäntele \@kleinerw4hnsinn (CC BY)

Competence to assess the curators (values) - values should be clear

  1. Search respectively find\

It's about finding interesting and relevant information and staying up to date. Distinguishing the really helpful, readable and learnable posts from the "chatter" among all the "noise". And to build a network of trusted sources and experts over time. So that people not only seek out information, but it automatically finds its way to us through our network. Good curators are also always reliable members of knowledge networks.\

  1. Filter, organize and enrich\

Filtering means separating the wheat from the chaff, knowing which sources and people you can trust and how to distinguish areas of knowledge from one another so as not to lose the red thread. In the next step, you have to find a clear and time-saving way to store the information, sort it and make it quickly findable.\ Then, in the most important step, enriching the value and benefit for the target group, you can work with the content in a meaningful way and, for example, write summaries, create cross-references, compare, ask critical questions, and so on. Curating yourself and creating an article or blogpost from different building blocks and artifacts is a very effective and powerful way to learn and build knowledge yourself.\

  1. Share & Exchange\

This is about developing a sense and practice for yourself, how to share your enriched content, when and with whom, how to share ideas and experiences in your networks, get feedback, get inspiration or collaborate with colleagues in your work.

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