A Good VC is Curation; A Good Lesson is Curation

Roxanne Glaser often sends me interesting ideas that I mull over. In the last several months, I’ve been thinking about her comments about curation. You’ll find that some people are suggesting that in the noise of social media, curation is “the next big thing”. For example:

Teaching is Curation

I’ve been thinking about….

  • how people are applying curation to the “noise” of the web
  • the poor search results on typical elementary research topics
  • the rumblings I’ve heard from a laptop school where teachers in higher grades grumble about the quality of scholastic skills from those students
  • the content generated sites at the top of search engines… sites that are jammed with ads and have low level quality content created for a few cents a page

I think that good teaching is curation….

  • Choosing an instructional design that meets the needs and interests of the students
  • Selecting the best resources to teach that concept
  • Creating a comfortable yet challenging learning environment
  • Selecting a few good information sources (not just Google!) for student project based learning
  • Teaching students to select quality information sources for their own research

A Good Videoconference is Curation

Arielle from The Cleveland Museum of Art presenting: “Race” is a Four Letter Word

I’ve been thinking about quality, engaging videoconferences….

  • Many are offered by museums who are already great at curation…
  • It’s true that teachers could collect the images and video clips and resources to teach a lesson the same as the videoconference; but it’s packaging all that which is hard.
  • Many awesome videoconferences are packaged lessons full of rich, visual resources…
  • Good teaching in a good videoconference is curation!

Find a Good Videoconference

Even as budgets tighten, there is still usually funding for instructional resources… great videoconferences are another excellent choice of instructional resources.

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