RG: I personally define curation as the ability to distill the most relevant information on a specific topic for a specific audience. To be an info-gatherer, subject matter expert, a passionate researcher of a topic even if you’re not an expert yet. It’s the ability to recognize interesting stuff, not just go out in the jungle to discover new species. To do this, you have to have some background on where to look and how to look at things. And then you have to be able to collect content in some orderly way and to present it within a context that has meaning for your audience. It doesn’t matter whether you are connected to an NGO or if you are in commercial sales. Curation becomes an opportunity for you to become a reference point, a go-to person, for that specific topic. And the more focused, the narrower the better. This doesn’t happen for the publisher or curator automatically.

RG: The librarian, or the data scientist, may have a different concept. They’re much more worried about their taxonomies and the preservation and classification of stuff in a systematic and orderly way, and there are very good reasons for that, because this goes all the way to science and biology. So the spectrum is very broad. We should allow flexibility. Curation is a number of things depending on its use.

RG: I do what I do because my deliberate mission on this planet is being an agent of change, to help other people find their own way out of the mainstream reality picture being provided about what they can do using communication and new technologies. I’ve chosen to do this. I enjoy helping other people find out about my discoveries and what works in terms of communication. I enjoy helping others become independent as entrepreneurs or organizations.

My target audience is comprised mostly of people interested in communication, but it’s varied. There are people like you, there are small independent publishers, bloggers, advertising agencies, NGOs. It’s very broad. They’re all interested in seeing how someone reaches outside the group. They’re interested in advertising, in making more money, but it’s also a curious approach into what is happening next. I try to see ahead. What can we do? What will work? What can we do to make this a better world? That’s what I try to do.

RG: I think that would be correct. Perhaps this is not relevant here, but it may provide more context. My name, Robin Good, is a pen name, as you know. I did not choose that name by accident. I also come from a place called Sharwood. So I’ve chosen to be kind of a metaphorical nephew of this guy who fought for the poor by using the money of the rich. I’ve had the opportunity to be exposed to a lot of information, to travel, to get a degree in the US. But I am not selling myself after having done so for many years, to the big companies, not even to the big NGOs, because they all disappointed me deeply. I am very much in the party of those who want to help people become more self-reliant using new media technologies. The Kevin Kellys, the Howard Rheingolds—these types of guys are my models.

RG: Everybody is curating, consciously or unconsciously, because there is such a proliferation of these tools. Curation tools have become parts of the other tools that we use every second. When we share an e-mail, click on Like on Facebook, share a page or an Instagram picture or a YouTube video, we’re making some kind of selection, we’re filtering for the benefit of others, at least potentially. The tools that are out there provide different degrees of opportunities for people to organize their ideas, their lives, the things they are interested in, the work they have to do, and the stuff they want to learn or teach others to comprehend better.

There are a fantastic and growing number of tools that are appropriately called curation tools. A blog or Facebook or Twitter can all be considered curation tools. Everybody is doing it at different levels. What catches my attention the most is those who have caught the potential to create value for others, to help others understand, to create an alternative to the dumbing monopoly of Google search. To offer educational alternatives to a list of search engine results, for somebody who doesn’t want a simple just-in-time product, but, instead, truly wants to learn about a topic.

On the other hand, content curation is being badly hijacked by the band of the content marketers. They’ve discovered that you can repost something by somebody else, and by doing this you can become the go-to person. You can save time because you don’t have to write anymore. In less time, you can become more important. They have completely hijacked the idea, the real use of curation, and they have been marketing it to everybody. That creates a double-edged sword. On one hand, I am bombarded by content that is just regurgitated. That would be bearable. But there is no value in stuff that nobody has vetted for me. People are sharing just because they want to show that they are sharing. It seems, in this moment, that everyone has to be sharing something of value to be relevant. So there is a tsunami of garbage floating around.

That’s one side of the sword. The other side is that when you have a tsunami of garbage floating around, when you actually see a sunflower or a rose, it stands out immediately

So there is a fantastic opportunity, for anyone who has the brains, to understand that the value is not in hijacking other people’s content and reposting without adding any value whatsoever, but in actually spending a lot more time, maybe decreasing the frequency of what you post, and becoming a trusted reference person because I can see you have looked at stuff and gone out of your way to find references that are worth selecting. It seems to me that most people are easily inebriated by the content marketing mantra—post more stuff.

RG: Robert Scoble is a pioneer, perhaps unconsciously. He’s defined what curation is about and why it is important. Maria Popova of Brain Pickings and John Gruber of Daring Fireball.

RG: It’s a good idea, providing the community with protocols and a standardized way to support discovery. But the adoption has been slow. People may be confused about the two codes she has presented; although they are both beautiful, the connection between them is not immediate. A number of logical and technical issues may thwart a good initiative. There are some technical issues. For example, some of the tools do not make it easy to attribute when using their bookmarklets.

RG: I am not a journalist or a librarian, but my approach is, whenever I can, I credit. But if I don’t recall how I ran into this, I am not going to go crazy trying to find out because I am not being paid by anybody. I do my best, but in some cases it’s very hard to trace back where you get things from. Much of the time you make discoveries by accident. When I read a good story, I want to read it line by line to the end. Then I read the comments, and I may follow a link in the comments and then, bingo! From there a whole universe opens.

RG: I don’t go after content. It comes after me, the whole bloody time. So what happens is that—my browser tabs grow fast, during the day. Newsletters come in, people tell me stuff on Skype, I’ll be talking with Joyce across the ocean, I learn about a new book. I am using Twitter. I open tabs and I don’t want to close them. So I have my system. Once they reach between 20 and 40, and my computer and browser start to show it, I have a button called OneTab. It creates a list of things I have to check. It builds up and I clean it up day by day. I have other priorities besides my content curation. I am not paid, but it helps build my reputation—like you calling me or for a future writing or consulting job. But it has no consistent or direct return, so I do it when I have a break.

I go back to the OneTab to see what I missed. Then I visit the links. If it’s a tool, I sign up and try it out. Does it work? Do I like it? I will not post about it if I did not first try it out. If it is an article, I’ll go read it. Is it interesting? Not interesting? What year is it? Who wrote it? I can’t always trust what people send to me. People pass me articles that look like news, like this article about Google I just got and wanted to share, but at the end of the article I discovered it was written two years ago. You’ve got to be careful. You have to read.

I really have to get a kick from the stuff I curate. I am not going to be remembered for how many tweets I posted in my life, but for what I have tweeted. So in the last year or so, I have gradually diminished the number of things I post. I started with ten channels I wanted to curate on Scoop.it, but I can hardly do one well. After two years of trying, I did not stop feeding the others, but it is rare when I do. I’ve decided to focus on the top channel, which is content curation. It’s the thing I love the most to take care of. And if I have stuff for the others, I won’t stop myself from adding.

So I read, check, vet, verify, scan. If it’s good, if it kicks in, if it’s part of the movie that I am in, if it’s something that should be remembered by me and everyone that I know as my good friend, then I go for it. People don’t want to waste time, so the best of what I find, I synthesize. What’s there? I think, “This is something that allows you to do this and this and this. Or this is for people who do this.” I try to add a summary and select an excerpt. If it’s a tool, I give somewhat of a testimonial. A testimonial forces me to write in a sentence or a paragraph what I think about it, including what I don’t think is good. When companies grab testimonials, they cut off what they don’t like anyway, but I know I am playing better for my readers because I don’t play like somebody who is being paid to please somebody or being paid under the table to promote a tool or product.

Going back to the routine of the workflow, sometimes I dig for references. Is there somebody to thank? I prepare for different channels. I have an audience in Italian, so when I scoop something, I share it on my Facebook fan page in Italian and customize the message for them with the hashtag for them. I also send it out to Twitter, customizing the line that goes out by adding relevant hashtags. I also go out to LinkedIn, in which case I don’t do anything. I let it go as is. For Scoop.it news curation, I think about tags. My approach is addressing the type of content. Is it an article or a tool? Is it free or commercial?

Before the tagging, I spend some time looking at the title. I try to use my librarian brain. I don’t believe in the journalistic approach, nor the bloggery one. So I am not going for impactful. I am going for the descriptive approach with categories and keywords at the beginning. So it might start with “Online marketing: How to do this and that” or “Content curation and learning: A new method to do this and that.” I want people to get the idea at a glance. My titles are not ironic; they’re not created to catch you.

After the title, I read my stuff aloud to catch mistakes. I double check, spell check, and re-read. I make sure my posts are going to the right channel and hit the button. That’s it.

When I write articles for Master New Media, which takes a number of days, that’s also curation, but it’s a more extended process. You research, you collect links.

RG: Some things you discover have not enough relevance for a post or even a scoop, but they need to be accounted for. If I come across a new tool and I don’t like it, I will still account for it—in my Pearltrees of tools for example. If it is particularly interesting, I will add it to another directory of tools I maintain on a platform called ZEEF, or I might stuff it away on Pinterest. We don’t have to stop the whole engine and sing about it. It just goes into the collection. So I write a description and take a screenshot if I need to.

You start developing a relationship with a number of tools that become handy in storing things. Like you may need to store film clips and description for a media studies class, and after a while, that might become valuable to you to write and study about it and imagine if you share it with others who share your background, point of view, and interests. It can be of great value. So all this side curation work is not mature, not ready for prime time, may lead to building pools of information that, with time, may be mature and worth talking about. So, sometimes you’re just gardening stuff.

RG: I should be very humble because I have very little exposure to this world. I can only imagine what they do. I use some of their metaphors to explain concepts to my students.

RG: So far, dear librarian, we have come to you. You’ve been sitting, and standing actually, behind the desk. We’ve come to you for help to find information on a topic, to be guided to the appropriate readings, related works of research, or novels that could inspire. We’ve come to you, dear librarian. But now, the Internet reverses this. We ask Google. We ask friends or our social networks where and how to find information.

But you, librarian, you are a container of deeply valuable information. So if you don’t make yourself available, interceptable in a way that displays and showcases all that wonderful knowledge, without requiring every single person to come and ask you in person and by voice, you are really doing a disservice, not just to us, but to yourself. Start to capitalize, to scale all the great work researching, studying, and organizing that you’ve done, but provide the opportunity for others to access that knowledge and experience. You do that by creating collections. There are millions of ways that librarians can become guides. Start from your strongest interests and passions. We don’t expect every librarian to be the reference point for everybody in the world, but we would like every librarian to take a little part of it.

Someone might be interested in psychology or flying through the stars. Others are more interested in poetry and algebra. That’s all fine if you can become a reference point to indicate what are the things to study and then become more innovative with the storytelling portion. Create YouTube videos.

This is what we need. We need people to guide us to the good stuff.

Robin Good on Twitter

@RobinGood

Robin Good’s Content Curation World (Scoop.it)

http://curation.masternewmedia.org

Master New Media

www.masternewmedia.org

Robin Good’s Bundlr on the definition of content curation

http://bundlr.com/b/content-curation-definition

Robin Good’s Pearltrees of Tools

www.pearltrees.com/robingood/content-curation-supermap/id5947231

Robin Good’s Content Curation (ZEEF)

https://contentcuration.zeef.com/robin.good

Robin Good’s Pinterest boards

www.pinterest.com/robingood

Brain Pickings, Maria Popova

www.brainpickings.org

Curator’s Code, Maria Popova and Kelli Anderson

www.curatorscode.org

Daring Fireball, John Gruber

http://daringfireball.net

Scobleizer, Robert Scoble

http://scobleizer.com

HJ: Curation is making sense of information, information artifacts, knowledge, for a specific need, clearly articulated standards, around a certain theme. It’s the ways in which collection is promoted.

HJ: For me, Personal Knowledge Management—I use Personal Knowledge Mastery now because a lot of people don’t like the management term because it comes from the KM world—Personal Knowledge Mastery is about becoming the master of your own personal knowledge. The Seek/Sense/Share framework [figure 7.1] came about around four or five years ago.

HJ: PKM is a set of processes, individually constructed, to help each of us make sense of our world and work more effectively. The main difference between curation and PKM is that PKM is for yourself; curation is for a selected audience.

Harold pointed to this explanation from the PKM section of his blog:

• Personal—according to one’s abilities, interests & motivation. (not directed by external forces)
• Knowledge—understanding information and experience in order to act upon it. (know what, know who, know how)
• Mastery—the journey from apprentice to disciplined sense-maker and sharer of knowledge. (masters do not need to be managed)¹

Harold explained that the PKM framework (figure 7.2) is built on three activities.

HJ: Seeking is about actively engaging with your world, both digital and nondigital, and being curious. Maria Popova, the world’s best curator of digital stuff, talks about the importance of curiosity. Basic tools for seeking include social bookmarking tools and platforms like Scoop.it. They help you gather stuff and tag and categorize it.

There are several underlying skills behind seeking. One is filtering, or what Howard Rheingold calls crap detection 101.² Even more important is the diversity of your network. Do you connect with people from different areas, of diverse opinions, genders, etc.?

One of the first exercises I do in my PKM workshops is a network mapping exercise. We explore where you get your information from and who you contact. We take a look at what we discover from multiple perspectives. Having great gender, geographic, or cultural diversity may not necessarily be important. It depends. But being cognizant of who is in your network and if diversity matters is important.

Sense is the hardest of the tasks. If you’re not doing anything, then it’s not real sense making. It’s the effort that makes a difference. It’s how we personalize information and use it. For me it’s blogging. It’s the effort of writing stuff and putting it out there. I recently decided to do a compilation of the best of. There are many ways to approach sense making. Robin Good is one of the few people who uses Scoop.it really well. Every single time he adds something, he adds his own commentary. I get hundreds of Scoop.it pingbacks on my blog, and they automatically go into spam because 99%, if not more, have absolutely no value to them. It’s about reflecting. Putting into practice what you’ve learned. PKM is adding value. If you’re not adding value, then don’t go to the third step, which is share.

Share: Sharing is about exchanging ideas and resources with networks and communicating with colleagues. When I grab something of interest, usually as a sharable social bookmark, I don’t pump them out. I don’t tweet them or say, “Hey, look what I just found.” I use discernment—deciding when, with whom, and where to share. And that puts the PKM into the curation. If you have good PKM skills, discerning when, where, with whom, and how to share is an important part of it. One of the advantages of having several thousand blog posts is that when you are having a conversation, you can grab relevant things and easily copy and share. It’s a nonlinear process. Often, you don’t know the value of that collected stuff until later.

HJ: I use really simple tools that stand the test of time. The blog is important.

Social bookmarks are like a gateway drug. You can see the value for yourself almost immediately when you are not at work at your home computer. And because we’re using web tools, by default, they’re sharable. I can choose to make my Delicious links either public or private. So, whatever tool you choose, it’s best to use one that allows you to share if by chance down the road you’ll want to be sharing. It’s the sharability, not the yes, you have to share, that’s important.

On Delicious, people follow me, but it’s not a value-added tool. Diigo automatically cross-posts to Delicious. It’s a back-up system. I really like Twitter because I can have loose connections with a lot of people. I am seeing a little bit more action on LinkedIn right now. SlideShare is a way to store slides and a good way to get your message out. I am playing with Medium. But the blog is the home base, not just because it’s a blog, but because I own it. It’s on my server. I have access to the backend and I have the backups. That gets to be really important after ten years.

HJ: For me, it’s just an interesting area. It’s how we make sense of our professions.

If you’re not getting any personal benefit, deepening your understanding, thinking critically, challenging assumptions and putting some half-baked ideas out there, then what are you doing this for? You should not be out there just adding noise. Saying, “look, look, look, look,” doesn’t really help anybody. When I run workshops, people tell me they’ve got thousands and thousands of these bits and pieces, but they don’t do anything with them. And I say to them, then why do you collect them? So simplify, reduce, do something of some value. And make it retrievable.

PKM is part of the social learning contract. It was important when we lived in villages. It’s the only way the human race is going to advance. At the same time, we still have these industrial structures, and there is no such thing as a guaranteed salary so we can’t just go and have fun.

This is a core skill set for the new middle class. The new middle class is not going to have jobs for life. The new middle class has battle scars, experience, and social media presences.

PKM is beneficial on both a personal and organizational level, but its real value is in increasing innovation. Without innovation, organizations cannot evolve.

PKM is about getting things done in networks, about making connections. If folks like us who are connected, who understand social media, who got a traditional education, and are self-educated, and have social media experience—if we don’t figure out how to make the world a better place, who the heck is going to? PKM is an important part of that skill set.

Harold Jarche Blog

www.jarche.com

Harold Jarche posts on PKM

www.jarche.com/pkm

ST: To me, it’s the ability to find, to filter, to evaluate, to annotate, to choose which sources are valuable. It’s the responsibility I have to my network—the niche that I am providing for them and what I choose to share.

ST: They are largely educators. Teachers who are thinking and aware and willing to grow in new forms. Specifically, from the beginning, I’ve built my network as a global network. When I choose to curate my network, I do it carefully so that it is geographically, culturally, and language diverse.

ST: Right, I agree. The idea of a niche, the idea of a brand that I stand for, so that those who choose to follow me can expect a certain type of resource and a certain type of sharing. It is important that other curators come in to create a network. So this person is my go-to person for iPads in the classroom, Joyce, you are in my network for new forms of library. So, I count on you to curate those resources for me. That’s why I have chosen you to be that puzzle piece. When somebody is not honest, or is very diluted about who they are or about what niche they are going to fulfill for me, it’s tougher to decide if I am going to add them to my network. I have specific needs relating to what I add to my network. Curators alone can be whatever they want to be, but if I am using them as part of a network, I need to be sure of what they will contribute. I’ve been watching the show The Voice lately and making connections. As they build their teams, they are looking for specific people for the specific types of songs they sing, their range. It’s similar to choosing network contributors.

ST: I see myself as representing globally connected learning, global awareness, and new forms of teaching and learning.

ST: I am trying hard to stay away from drawing attention to tools at this point. My main platform is Twitter and my blog. I have newsfeeds set up and I make discoveries through my RSS reader. I use Feedly and also Zite [now acquired by Flipboard]. Twitter is my main feed. Again, I rely on others in my network to filter, to push out, the resources I might have otherwise missed. I am also on the lookout for new connections to add to my network. So if someone says, “Check out this one,” I’ll look at their Twitter feeds and see if they have a blog and I may add them to my other channels.

ST: I have a hashtag search. I use TweetDeck as another way of filtering. I’ve started to rely more on lists, because at this point I follow more than 6,000 people on Twitter. I don’t subscribe to the philosophy—let’s keep it under 100. I am okay with 6,000 because I filter further and I filter for the contributions of international educators. Currently, I have other filters for sketch-noting.

ST: Right. It’s visual curation, addressing the notion that text alone doesn’t always interest or feel right. It’s important to address those who are visually inclined as well as those who are text-inclined.

ST: Maybe I am selfish, but I curate mostly for myself. For instance, when I write on Twitter, when I retweet, what I choose to share automatically feeds into a Twitter blog on Langwitches which has a search box. It’s overwhelming, but if I wasn’t curating, I would feel even more overwhelmed. It gives me a sort of control to control that feeling. It puts me in charge, with the understanding that information is not controllable anymore. For my purposes, I am okay with that, because I am able to filter, I am able to curate and categorize and archive and share. If I didn’t have that skill, I would feel lost in a big ocean.

ST: It’s about both. It started out personally and that’s still a huge part of it, but I believe if we don’t share best practices, that this is really happening and no, you can’t pretend that we’re still in 1990, that’s the only way we are actually going to change education. Currently, I am involved in recording videos of model lessons—another form of curation. One, with an 8th grade teacher, is an early attempt at supporting students in curating content from their peers to create their own understanding. It’s constructivist. Everything is connected. If a teacher has not experienced learning using new types of curation, they’re not able to teach it to their students. The first step is that a teacher needs to be able to learn by curating from her own network. The more that people see it, the more they’ll learn from and maybe recognize that they may be a little bit behind. Sharing is a tremendous part of helping to shift education.

ST: I have one time experienced the revelation, or the full bliss of curation. It happened at the Building Learning Communities Conference. It was the first time I was sitting in a keynote where I felt that I was in a room of people who understood and lived and experienced the same things that I did regarding curation. It was through Twitter, and for the first time, I realized I could rely on my network. I was listening to the keynote, and on the time line, as the feed was coming in, I thought, yes, that’s exactly what the speaker said and that the tweeter was so much better at articulating than I could have. And yes, there was Brad sitting right next to me with his sketch notes. So I had the text and that articulation. I had the visual notes, and Darren was pulling in images, and I was pretty good at finding the resources and the links and suggested that people look also at this one. And there was a woman who wrote a poem about the keynote and shared the link on Twitter.

ST: Right, it was the feeling that I did not have all the responsibility for catching it all. I was confident that the people who were curating using the hashtag had the skills and were bringing in different perspectives, and that relieved quite a bit of anxiety of feeling like you had to capture it all yourself.

ST: And this is in such contrast to so many other conferences or workshops I attend where you may see only a handful people who have a Twitter account and are unsure of how this works. When all the responsibility is on me to show, to share, it’s hard.

ST: Yes, it was an incredible experience, and I catch glimpses of it, but I haven’t really seen it since. When you catch these glimpses, you hope that the Twitter newbies feel how powerful it is [figure 7.3]. Learning is social. Teachers need to experience this, and we have to get curation into the classroom. Kids are not born with this skill set. Teachers have to teach curation. It’s a disservice to the kids if teachers choose not to experience this and get on board. Kids are not going to learn to do this through osmosis. They need to learn how to manage their information lives. Curation is information literacy. The kids have to build learning networks. The kids have to curate. Otherwise we are not preparing kids for managing their information lives.

Silvia’s blog Langwitches

http://langwitches.org/blog

Silvia on Twitter

@langwitches

Brad Ovenell-Carter’s (Braddo) Sketch Notes on Pinterest

www.pinterest.com/braddo/sketch-notes