Curation Exploration 2.0

     
My paper.li sites:
"Physics stuff"
"Strauss' Ed and Tech News"  
"Strauss Science and Health News" 
     
        Curation is a great way to find "stuff" online that has been recommended by others. One of the resources I enjoy pulls content from my twitter feed and curates it on the paper.li curation site. The most popular links are posted in a newspaper format that allows one to not only see those links, but get a visual representation of them from the pictures within the article of website or a short summary of the article giving the reader an idea of what the page is about. Another great thing about curation is being able to organize all of this information by topic. I have a topic about science news (and I added health to the title since it also had a bunch of health articles) and I have a topic about educational technology to keep up with the latest trends in 21st century teaching resources. I share my newspaper on twitter for others that may be interested in the topics I post.

         I chose to try a different curation tool called scoop.it. I have heard raves reviews of this site from some of my classmates, but never took the time to use it. However, this week I have finally started to use it and I must say I am enjoying my experience. Scoop.it is different from paper.li in that it let's you use tags and searches many different sites for content. Then it let's you chose the content you want to post onto your topic page. The process is not automatic like paper.li. This allows the person to personally choose each topic that is posted. Paper.li just added a feature that let's you choose articles to post, but they still post other articles from your twitter or Facebook feed. Paper.li is also limited to twitter, facebook, or rss feed. Scoop.it searches many other sites along with twitter like google sites, digg, and youtube. It expands the amount of information you get. 

        When I started to use paper.li I thought that it could be used with students to allow them to find resources to blog about or do research on. However, it is hard to control what information is posted. I have found that some of the information would be at too high of a level for my students or it some could be considered inappropriate for their age (for example since I have biology on there, there were some articles about sex, not pornography or anything, but dealt with science of sex type of things). With scoop.it you could control everything that shows up and so you can filter out inappropriate topics. So this site would be better to use with students. Plus I think it's more visually friendly for the students with the pictures and previews of the videos posted. 

       Overall, I think I will use it to save the resources that I find on scoop.it and "rescoop" them to my page and maybe share some to twitter of Facebook if I think they are really useful or just plain cool. I can also use it to find topics relevant to what I am teaching in class and to give my students resources for research or interest. I do not think I would have them curate for class just because they may pick inappropriate content to post, but I can certainly suggest they use it for themselves. I will most likely just use it to save information I find through scoop.it and occasionally content I find on my own. 

       I think paper.li and scoop.it both have great advantages. Paper.li is nice for summarizing topics from twitter since it's hard to keep up with like 500+ tweets a day. And scoop.it is great for a more personalized curation experience. I have also discovered the "lists" feature in twitter which allows me to group the people I follow by topic, so I can still catch tweets from those who have not posted an article or other resource. For example, I have a list of just science teachers, one for ed tech, another for entertainment, one for news, and another for friends. I have about 9 lists total and it let's me check out what I want to check out without feeling overwhelmed by the 126 people I follow. Curation overall is a great way to keep all of this information organized and allow you to see what you want to see instead of sifting through a bunch of random articles. 

So speaking of curation, I thought I would post a video I found through scoop.it via Karen (my professor, check her page out- Innovations in e-Learning ) and it's about...you guessed it...curation! ;-)