Mobile content curation

This is a continuation in my series on mobile learning.

What is digital curation? For those who visit museums or galleries, curators are those who are expert in a specific genre of exhibit, and who ensure that the displays are kept up to date, accurate and relevant to the viewing public. Curation is at the very heart of the success of any museum or art gallery. Digital curation is similar in many ways. It is becoming more important as content increases. Mitch Kapor once declared 'Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant.' It does feel like that sometimes. We are experiencing a tsunami of content, and we are in danger of being swamped by it, every minute we are online. Finding what you want is usually quite simple. Google and other advanced search engines ensure that. Organising it and managing it is another matter.

Curation of content is one specific response to the problem of information overload. Curation is more than mere aggregation of content. Curation involves organising and adding value to that content once it is aggregated. There are many tools and services now available to users to help them curate content. Some are fairly easy to use, enabling users to share content they find in an organised and highly visual manner. Scoop.it and Pearltrees are useful for this purpose. Others allow you to create a sequence of content, perhaps stuff that you have gathered from a conference or other event. Storify is very useful if you want to do this kind of curation. In my personal opinion, perhaps the most useful and versatile curation tool is Diigo, which enables you to do all of the above, and also take snapshots of websites so you can revisit them, even if they suddenly disappear. Watch the video on the front page of the website and you'll see what I mean.

Mobile device users can capitalise extensively on the many features of curation tools. As has been previously written in this article, mobile devices are ideally suited for the task of curation on the move. They can adapt to the style and personal preferences of users, to 'store files, publish thinking, and connect learners, making curation a matter of process rather than ability.' One more thing - mobile content curation also enables users to interact with their environments more meaningfully.

There is a design issue. It's important for teachers and learners that tools are transparent. That is, tools should be so simple to use that the user thinks more about learning, than how to operate the tool. It's a complete waste of time if a student spends more time trying to work out how to navigate around a website, than they do focusing on the content of the website. In a recent interview I was asked a question about what impact I though mobile devices will have on learning. I replied that the proliferation of mobile devices is only going to drive user generated content in one direction - upwards. Content will always increase rather than decrease. If we all became mobile curators, content could be organised in such a ways that learning would be enhanced, extended, enriched and engaged, rather than detached, confused and diffused.

Photo by The Society Pages


Mobile content curation by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.