Content Curation
Content curation graphic by Manskakisemiils, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
Content Curation: Why?
The COVID-19 pandemic is another example of how important it has become to be able to evaluate online information and sort good information from all of the information available. There is more available information than we can consume, so how can we filter through the information available to find information that we can use to make decisions about our health, and the health of our family, community, and planet?
In order to evaluate information about biological issues and challenges at the intersection of biology and society, where biology intersects with our personal experiences, we need a foundation of how science works and the basic principles of biology. I hope that is why you are here - to build a foundation of biology that you can use to sort information and make decisions for the rest of your life.
While completing your Synthesis Project in our course, you will use the basic principles of biology that you are learning while completing study guides and lab activities to curate content about a biological issue of interest to you. But what does it mean to curate content? To help you explore what is meant by "content curation", I have curated some content about curation below. Please explore the curated content below, and then do your own online search for "content curation" if you would like to read about content curation from more points of view. If you find any good resources that explain the topic in a different way that helps you understand, please share them with me!
The three main guidelines we will follow while curating content in this course are:
Provide a link to the original source of the content, and include citations and attributions where appropriate.
Add value to the curated content: introduce the content, summarize what you think are the most important points in the content, make connections between different sources of information, and share your own insights.
Share accessible content. This includes videos with captions, and adding alternative text to images.
What is Content Curation?
Here is a 1.5 minute introduction to content curation that uses the example of a museum curator to explain that curators "carefully assemble connected items with a point of view, with the goal of enlightening or altering the understanding or perception of the patrons of the museum." Curators focus on connection and provide added value by adding a point of view to a collection.
Why Should Students Curate Content?
This 1.5 minute video explains that "curators ask thoughtful questions and find resources that are accurate and interesting, they geek out on the content, finding the takeaways, make sense out of ideas. . . . they add their own unique lens that they share with an audience."
Consume - Curate - Collaborate
In Content Curation: Finding The Needles in the Haystacks, Christopher Lister, a Canadian educator and librarian, defines content curation as "More than merely collecting content on a specific subject; to curate is to make sense of the information we consume online. Strong curation involves carefully selecting content and evaluating it for a specific purpose, topic, or subject. It also involves making decisions about what is and is not useful to deepening understanding of the subject. Content deemed useful can then be customized and personalized, by the curator, by adding ones professional experience to enhance it before sharing that curated content with one’s learning network. Curating is a higher-level thinking skill. In order to curate content that is useful for others the content needs to be synthesized, evaluated, and interpreted before being disseminated. Well curated topics and subjects help to inform and allow learning to happen at faster rates."
Christopher Lister shares a cycle of content curation that includes consuming content from many different sources, curating the content through the processes of evaluation, interpretation, and personalization, and collaboration through sharing the content, connecting with others, and inviting contributions. (Lister 2013)
Digital Content Curation by Christopher Lister, licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0
From your instructor . . .
For me, content curation means using our own experiences and perspectives of a subject to select and share good information that tells a story, or paints a complete picture, of a topic. This includes citing, or including an attribution, so our audience knows where the information comes from, and so the original content creator receives credit for their work.
There are many different ways to share information and connect to an audience. We all come to a subject with different experiences, perspectives, and goals. We organize information differently, and prefer different formats. It is up to you whether you use more written text, images, audio, or video, and the style of text, images, audio, and video that you use. You can share videos of experts with your own introduction or summary, or you can make your own video to share information that you have consumed and digested. You can introduce and interpret images produced by experts, or you can use what you learn in our course to produce your own images, diagrams, flow chart, or any other visual graphic to share information. Text can include everything from paragraphs to bullet points to poetic verses.
I hope you will use your own interests and strengths to personalize the content that you share with your co-learners in this course. You will add value to the information you share by using your experiences, and your understanding of biology, to sort through the information available on a topic and share the information that you find to be the most reliable and most useful. Your own introductions to, or summaries of, each source will allow you to add your own voice, connect to your audience, and help them navigate the flood of information available.
Here are 5 steps to content creation from Masooma Memon at ContentStudio. These are written from the perspective of using content curation in marketing, but I think they do a great job of outlining the steps you will take when completing your Synthesis Project:
Assembly: Gathering content for your audience that lies within your field and interests your readers.
Selection: Not all sourced content is relevant or share-worthy enough. Here’s where you set up filters and wear the approve-this-disapprove-that hat.
Categorization: Content comes in different formats . . . At this point, you decide which content will go where for optimal engagement.
Commentary: Curation is not copy-pasting and posting a link . . . Instead, it’s adding your take on the matter as well.
Presentation: Giving the content you share a visual makeover. For instance, you share data that someone else has churned out but put in a graphic. (Memon 2019)
A Starter Kit for Content Creation
This 8 minute video is a deeper dive into content curation, including an explanation of how it contributes to participatory culture, the benefits of participatory culture, and an introduction to some models of content curation (aggregation, distillation, elevation, and mashup). This video defines content curation as "the process of gathering information relevant to a particular topic or area of interest, usually with the intention of adding value."
I hope this curation of content about content curation models our three main guidelines for content curation:
I provided links to the original content, and attributions and citations where appropriate.
I introduced and interpreted the content I shared, and added my own insights about content curation.
I only shared videos that are captioned, and I added alternative text to the images on this page.
We will learn about attributions, citations, and how to share accessible content as steps in our Synthesis Project.
Works Cited*
Lister, Christopher. "Content Curation: Finding The Needles in the Haystacks." Unlearn to Learn. 1 Dec. 2013. Accessed 17 Jan. 2022.
Memon, Masooma. "5 Major Steps To Content Curation: A Beginner’s Guide To Content Curation". ContentStudio. 19 Nov. 2019. Accessed 17 Jan. 2022.
*I used the MLA Works Cited: Electronic Sources guide at the Purdue Online Writing Lab for help formatting my Works Cited. We will discuss citations and attributions further, there are many different ways you can format your citations and you can choose the format you want to use, just try to stay consistent and be sure to provide enough information to find the original content, including a direct link to the original content if it is available online.