On Friday I hosted a webinar for some of my co-workers at Alberta Education to listen to Jeffery Heil’s archived #etmooc session #T0S3 Introduction to Social Curation. The original session took place on January 17 and the archived Blackboard session can be found here. (If you have trouble connecting with a Mac, try updating your version of Java.)
Jeffery talked about the difference between social bookmarking and content curation, and gave an introduction to a few tools which can be used for each purpose while the participants in the chat added their suggestions for tools to use and how they have used them effectively.
It was an interesting to listen to an #etmooc archive with people who have not taken part in a live #etmooc session. They found it hard to engage with the topic, especially since there was not even a photo of Jeffery to look at as he was talking and there were a few glitches with the page synchronization in his presentation. I have found that there is a real tangible energy during live sessions, visible in the session chats which fly past at warp speed as well as conversations in the Twitterverse as the session unfolds. I missed this connection in the archive, I don’t know if this is because the session took place before the official start to #etmooc and there were less participants than in later sessions or if it is the result of participating asynchronously.
Rather than summarize the session in this post, I am going to take advantage of the social curation that other etmoocers have done and point to their work.
On the day of the webinar Will Richardson wrote that Curators Rule the World and I found this Ultimate list of content curation tools. Beth Kanter’s post about Social Curation stood out for me because it is not approaching the topic from the educational perspective. Sometimes I worry that my filters are too strong and I missing the perspective of non educators. Jennifer Funk published this post about educators as curators which has a similar message. I really liked Robin Good’s Vimeo presentation about Content Curation from Emerge2012; it is filled with good examples and links. jheil65 shared his Symbaloo PLN collection. I have never used Symbaloo before, but I recognized the format from a video that was shared with a grade 7 Science Student discussing her PLN earlier in the day.
I still haven’t had a chance to listen to Dean Shareski’s session T1S2 Sharing as Accountability, you can listen to the archive here, but I have always liked what @shareski has to say and I am looking forward to hearing his perspective about the responsibility that we have to share and curate. You can also view @shareski’s keynote presentation Sharing as Caring for the 2010 K-12 On-Line conference. Shane Brewer’s post was a response to Shareski’s session but his questions about responsibility also apply to the topic of social curation. Lyn Hilt also shared some of her thoughts about teachers and sharing.
The #etmooc diigo collection can be found here. Janetta Garton’s post Using Diggo for Collaborative Curation has great instructions on how to use diggo.
One of the things I appreciate about the posts and tools that others share (their curated links) is that they help me wade through information overload. Although this post from Sue Waters is about making sense of all of the information coming at us in #etmooc, her advice and instructions are useful for anyone who is trying to make sense of all of the information that is available on the web.