Sunday, March 24, 2013

Leaders Must Be Curators

Wikipedia describes Digital curation as
...the selection, preservation, maintenance, collection and archiving of digital assets. Digital curation establishes, maintains and adds value to repositories of digital data for present and future use. This is often accomplished by archivists, librarians, scientists, historians, and scholars. The term curation in the past commonly referred to museum and library professionals. It has since been applied to interaction with social media including compiling digital images, web links and movie files.
Curation as a teacher is vital. Curation as a administrator is vital. Curation as a leader is vital. Curation as a life-long learner is vital. Curation helps us interact with the resources available; it helps us categorize, organize, and share resources with others. In curating resources we learn, grow, and contribute to our professional and personal learning networks in a hugely beneficial capacity that is only outmatched by the reciprocity it produces if done using social media like Diigo, Twitter, blogs, etc.

Will Richardson wrote a blog post last month titled Curators Rule the World where he highlighted a quote by Joe Coleman in his post Long Form Journalisms Ressurection"We’re now at a point where curators rule the content world, by collectively deciding whether content gets amplified or lost." This is a great point that curation can help us with the vital 21st century skill of managing information in the information age by allowing the curation of resources to be a communal activity with the work load dispersed allowing for more learning and less searching.

For an example, below are seven (7) of the 20+ resources I bookmarked on Diigo this week and shared on Twitter with my followers, the #edchat and #edtech chats, and my fellow teachers via Twitter, email, or "come here and look at this":

Robert K. Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership --> During my blog post last week How May I Help You? (Servant Leadership) I found the actual center responsible for holding the annual conference on servant leadership and maintaining the body of knowledge around it, I bookmarked it for future resource gathering in this area of leadership.

Online classes may worsen educational achievement gap, study shows --> I read this Seattle Times article and sent the link out to our district's technology and distance education coordinator to help in the ongoing discussion in our district of using out online classes as credit recovery opportunities.

50 Educator Twitter Accounts Worth Following --> I used this TeachThought blog post as an opportunity to grab a few new Twitter users to follow (like plugged-in superintendent Tom D'Amico and connect principal Lyn Hilt) and to share with my colleagues who are just starting out on Twitter.

6 Steps To A Flipped Classroom --> I used this TeachThought blog post (I like TeachThought quite a bit) to build my knowledge base about flipped classrooms, because I am interested in the idea but skeptical about best practices related to it as well.

Picking the Best Platform for Class Blogging --> I started a class blog and leadership blog this year, and next year I would like to start giving students individual blogs so I am gathering resources for that change next year and this FreeTech4Teachers resource was a great addition.

The Roman Empire on Google Maps --> I teach 6th grade social studies which focuses on ancient history and this resource will make a great resource next quarter when we study The Roman Empire more closely, I also shared it with the other teachers in my district for a great resource from the Google Maps Mania blog.

Could There Actually Be One "C" To Rule Them All?! --> I thought this was a great piece from the ConnectedPrincipals blog of the "C" discussion of Common Core and vital 21st century skills that I enjoyed reading and shared with my school.

Curation is not just about aggregation - curation is the deliberate act of collecting, organizing, annotating, and sharing resources that will benefit others and hopefully start or contribute to conversations that will help those involved learn and grow. It is about dipping into the rivers of resources like Twitter, Pinterest, or blogs and sifting out as many golden resources as we can. Curation is how we learn in the information age; it is an art, a passion, and a skill that all leaders need to have in their toolbox.


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Leaders Must Be Curators by Anthony Pascoe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

2 comments:

  1. Hi, Anthony,
    Thanks for including me in your great post. I agree that curation is important to help make sense of the wealth of information that surrounds us and to share with others. Thanks for sharing here!

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    1. Thanks for stopping by my blog! Looking forward to connecting with you more in the future.

      Tony

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