20 Curating
Curation is the selection, acquisition, contextualization, and presentation of content for one or more audiences. Curation activities can involve individual students, teams, or whole classes. Curation gives students the chance to critique the nature and value of information sources; prioritize key themes, events, or artifacts; consider the impact of audience; learn about attribution, copyrights, and licensing; and practice critical thinking, creativity, and digital literacy skills.
Bhargava (2011) identifies the following models of content curation:
- Aggregation: most relevant information about a topic (comprehensive)
- Distillation: most important or influential ideas on a topic
- Elevation: a larger trend, insight, or connections regarding a topic
- Mash-up: a story or new perspective created through different types of media
- Chronology: changes over time (a form of elevation) or the mostinfluential elements leading up to an event or phenomenon (a form of distillation)
Practice examples
Select the following links to see examples of curation activities in practice:
- Ranked list or playlist: Students create a list of resources or, in the case of the example activity, primary sources and defend their choices. Other students can be invited to comment or rank their level of agreement.
- Mixed tape: Students create an audio or multimedia collection around a theme and defend their choices.
- Website: Students research and organize sources by tags in individual or crowdsourced activities.
Additional resources
- Concordia University Portland: Essential skills for the 21st century: Teaching students to curate content
- Cult of Pedagogy: To boost higher-order thinking, try curation
- informED: Teaching content curation and 20 resources to help you do it
- University of South California Rossier: Fourteen ways students can usePinterest in the classroom.
