Curation Spaces Orientation

If I were to pick two verbs for you to take away from this class, they would be CREATE and CURATE. The idea of creation is one that is familiar to you, but curation might be something new, and it's something really important for coping with the online world and the wonderful — and overwhelming! — resources you will find there.

Curation basically means selecting and organizing things (all kinds of things: websites, tools, conversations) in a thoughtful way. The Internet is a pretty chaotic place, and curation is a way to bring some order to the chaos. Here are some important curation strategies that you probably do every day:

   * searching for content

   * selecting the best content

   * bookmarking content for future use

   * organizing bookmarks for easy access

   * annotating content with your thoughts

   * sharing with others

If you have a few minutes and are interested in exploring this idea some more now, I'd recommend that you get to know Howard Rheingold, one of my Internet heroes. He coined the word "infotention" (information/attention), and he is also famous for his "crap detection" tools. Howard is very visible online, so if you Google him, you will find all kinds of ways to learn about his work, and you can also Google infotention (it's very Google-able!). I was so excited that he did a video interview with me last spring (yes, that's what I look like, ha ha), which means I got a chance to share my excitement about student Storybook projects with a totally new audience, and I finally met Howard in person at the Digital Media Learning conference this summer. (I wrote about that conference in my intro post; that conference is what prompted me to make curation more of an explicit focus in my classes this year.)

Since the aspect of curation I most want to emphasize is the sharing and collaboration aspect, I'll embed Howard's TED talk on The New Power of Collaboration as a video you can watch if you have time (or you can read the transcript) - it's from the early days of TED videos, back in 2005, ten years ago!

So, explore some of the Howard magic if you have time (he is really one of the most extraordinary people I have ever met), and then move on to the rest of this assignment, which has three parts: I'll ask you to get ready to do bookmarking for this class (an essential curation activity!), and next I'd like for you to explore three new tools for sharing online that I hope you might want to try out in this class (Twitter, Pinterest, Known). Then, to finish up, I'll ask you to write up a blog post with your thoughts about curation, and I'd also like to ask for your feedback and ideas about how I can make curation and sharing a useful part of the class this semester!

PART ONE: BOOKMARKING.

Every web browser has features that allow you to bookmark your favorite websites. Your browser should also allow you to organize those bookmarks into folders (and subfolders, etc.). There should be a bookmarks toolbar that you can configure for instant access to your essential bookmarks and folders. Your browser should prompt you to log in to an account that allows you to synchronize your bookmarks across computers so that you can access your bookmarks on any device, and you should also be able to back up your bookmarks locally for safekeeping.

For this assignment, I'd like you to explore those options in whatever browser it is that you use. At a minimum you need to make sure you have a bookmarks folder for this class, in addition to the other useful browser options mentioned above. If you are not sure how to manage your browser bookmarks with folders, just Google your question, and I'm sure you will find a good tutorial for managing bookmarks in your browser of choice.

As you can see, I name my bookmark folders with just a single letter so I can squeeze more folders into my toolbar!

PART TWO: TOOLS FOR SHARING.

You already have a blog, which is a great space for curation and sharing. You can save things in your blog so that you can find them later, and other people can benefit from seeing what things you find useful/important enough to save in your blog. Each week this semester, starting in Week 2, there will be an extra credit "Curation Spaces" assignment where you can write up a blog post with the best things you found online during the week, creating a weekly collection that you can share with others via your blog.

I'm also hoping I can tempt you to try to some other curation tools! I use probably about a dozen different curation tools (yes, I am a total geek...), and what I've done here is to pick the three tools that I thought would give you the best opportunity to explore new ways of curating and sharing, either on your own OR as part of a group project. They are: Pinterest (something you use on your own, creating Board(s) for this class), Twitter (which you can use on your own OR by using a group Twitter account for this class), and Known (an incredibly cool new online tool that we can use together as a class). Please take a few minutes to read about each one and, if you are interested in experimenting, you'll find lots of extra credit Tech Tips that will teach you about each tool. Here are some quick introductions to each tool:

• Pinterest. I ignored Pinterest for years, thinking it was just for shopping and cooking... boy, was I wrong about that! For the topics I study, Pinterest has turned out to be one of the most powerful research tools that I have found, and it is also a fantastic way to share my work with others. So, to get a sense of how I use Pinterest, take a look at my Pinterest Boards. Maybe you will want to create your own Board(s) for this class!

• Twitter. It also took me years to figure out how to make Twitter work for me (since 140 characters is just not a lot of space, ha ha — and you can see I am very wordy), but now I use Twitter both to connect with people around the world (educators, writers, artists...), and also as a way to share my work. In the past, I have not had a lot of luck in encouraging students to use Twitter for this class, but I am really hoping that with a "class Twitter" that you can log on to and use anonymous (we'll all use that same Twitter account together), more people might want to experiment! Meanwhile, to see how I use Twitter, you can look at my two Twitter accounts: the account I use for my work, OnlineCrsLady, and the account I use for class resources, OnlineMythIndia. You can see that class Twitter account embedded in the sidebar of this wiki.

• Known. This is something totally new for this class, and I am really excited about it! Known is open source software and, thanks to the create.ou.edu project here at OU, I was able to install Known for us to use as a group project for class. I've started using the class Known already, and you can see what it looks like here: OnlineMythIndia Known. If you want to contribute, you can create a Known account and your Known posts will show up there together with mine and the posts of other people in the class who are contributing and sharing there. To see how that can work, see Brynn's first post to our class Known, with an explanatory blog post here.
  
  This summer I met the software developers who are creating Known, and I am very excited about their vision for the future of this platform; if you are curious, you can read more about them here: The Known Team.

So, as I mentioned above, you can use the Tech Tips extra credit option (that's coming up next on the assignment list for this week!) to learn more about these platforms. I really hope you will want to try at least one of them, and maybe you will want to try all three, in addition to the blog you'll be using every week for your class assignments. There are lots of other tools out there for curation and sharing, and in the blog post to finish up this assignment you can let me know if there are curation tools that you are using. I'm always interested to find out what strategies people are using to make the Internet work for them!

PART THREE: BLOG POST.

Please write up a blog post to finish this assignment. Let me know if you had any trouble configuring your browser's bookmark folders, and I'm also really curious to learn about the strategies you use for bookmarking and other kinds of curation. So, please include your thoughts about that, and also your thoughts about curation and sharing online, both for school and outside of school. If you are not sure what to write about, here are some questions to ponder:

How do you keep track of all the online resources you need for school? for work? for life in general? Do you have any good tools or strategies you can recommend to others? Are you familiar with Pinterest and/or Twitter and/or Known? Do you use any of these tools now? Are you interested in trying out any of those tools for this class and, if so, what in particular intrigues you about a particular tool? Overall, would you say you are doing a good job with keeping track of information online? Is it something you would like to manage better? Do you have any ideas about what we can do in this class to create a good curation-and-sharing experience? Any thoughts, questions, ideas, suggestions will be welcome!

Also, please include some kind of image (with image information) that provides a good illustration for your ideas and thoughts about curation and sharing! Include the phrase "Week 1 Curation" somewhere in your blog post title, and please use "Curation" as the label on the blog post too. If you are curious, you can see the posts so far for this assignment here: Curation Posts.

And don't forget to do the Declaration when you're done: