"Content curation" seems to be the new buzzword nowadays. In the era of information overload, when not only information abounds but also misinformation, it seems essential to have a trustworthy filter that will select the most relevant data for us. Forbes indicates four reasons why content curation has gone mainstream:
- Growing quantity led to sinking quality
- We live in a social world
- Trust is invaluable
- Content is powerful
This has a direct impact on our work as educators, we are no longer expected to be a repository of contents as much as a curator of contents. To exemplify, in the past, if a teacher wanted to explain some cultural aspect, let's say the British tea ceremony, he or she would explain his or her first-hand experience, give out a worksheet or show a video. If we are to be content curators, though, following the picture above, we would need to inform ourselves first, maybe browsing different websites and contents, organizing them into a coherent logical sequence, commenting on them and maybe adding an activity or quiz created by us, but we would let the students group the pieces together, very much in line with the flipped classroom model.
However, since we are all individuals, with our own personal tastes, political, cultural, religious orientations, I guess we run the risk of filtering in a biased way... therefore the importance of the community, as this blog article points out, it's important to actively "network with other content creators to develop planned curation, with an end goal of increasing your audience".
