Content Curation
Content curation from a trainer’s perspective
Why content curation?
One of the characteristics of web 2.0 is that more and more people produce content. Search engine results become increasingly unsatisfactory as they are often polluted by irrelevant and commercially-driven results. As a consequence, it becomes increasingly time-consuming to isolate quality content about a particular topic. Contributing factors include:
- Lack of focus: Traditional media provide content on more than one topic, which means that a lot of information is not relevant to one’s particular interest, or too superficial and generic.
- Overlapping: Many information sources provide similar content. This is exacerbated by the fact that many sources do not publish original content but simply pass-on existing content, without any added value (re-tweeting, etc.).
- Marketing / Spam: Many sources are “polluted” by marketing messages.
What is content curation?
Content curation can be described as an attempt to solve this problem by discovering, organizing and sharing the best and most relevant content on a specific issue. In its simplest form, the organizational aspect of content curation is about aggregating the stream of news from your most trusted sources and sharing "as is". More elaborate organization activities involve not only aggregating, but also filtering and editing content before sharing it. Examples of content editing include improving titles, tagging, writing comments, and summaries, adding images, listing credits, or linking to related content. It is worth noting that content curation can also apply to information not found on the web, such as print magazine articles or textbooks.
Content types
Original vs Curated
Original content is produced by the person publishing it, while curated content refers to content produced by someone else and passed on by the curator (with more or less editing). Compared to original content, curated content is more cost-effective but more generic.
News-based vs Evergreen
Most content curation tools only handle news-based content, i.e. content with a short “shelf-life”, and display it as a linear stream of news. However, content curation can also apply to so-called “evergreen” content, which is relevant for a longer period of time. Evergreen content includes for example:
- How-to guides and tutorials
- FAQs
- Industry definitions
- Resource lists (“Top Ten” lists, etc.)
Individual vs Collaborative
Content may be published by an individual or by a group.
Why content curation matters for trainers
Discovering, organizing and sharing information relevant to a particular area of interest is a core activity for trainers. Trainers will particularly focus on:
- the discovery aspect of curation (staying up to date in their area of expertise)
- organizing and presenting evergreen information
Real-time sharing of curated news-based content is less relevant for trainers, as they are not required to continuously “feed” their student community with new information, training courses being only updated periodically. However, trainers may also have an interest in this aspect of content curation as part of their networking activities with other subject matter experts. Trainers cannot limit themselves to content curation: they have to combine it with original content publishing. Obviously, if content curation is an important skill for any trainer, it should also become an important part of any Train the Trainer course.
Why content curation matters for learners
“Certifications and diplomas prove little about a person skills and abilities in the real world. Today, the job marketplace requires people who can "think". People who can come up with creative solutions to unexpected problems, people who are prepared to be continuously challenged by new discoveries and innovations but who can discern which are relevant and immediately useful for their goals.” In today’s rapidly changing environment, information can indeed quickly become irrelevant. It is becoming increasingly critical to be able to learn quickly about a particular topic, instead of memorizing a lot of information. As a result, content curation should matter to trainers as well, in the sense that discovery skills especially should become part of any higher education programme.
Content curation tasks
Discovering
There are multiple ways of searching and filtering information, the most common being to use a search engine, followed by further filtering manually. A natural evolution of this concept is that of persistent searches, which allows users to enter a search query just once and then receive automatic updates whenever new content that meets their search criteria is published on the web. This is particularly useful for very specific topics. Another avenue of discovery is to identify and follow authoritative sources, by using various forms of subscriptions. Typically, blogs can be monitored using RSS feed readers. Other sources can be monitored using similar technologies. For example, one can subscribe to youtube video channels, or follow specific people / topics on various discussion forums or social networks (facebook, twitter, LinkedIn groups, etc.). Yet another way of discovering content is to trust automatic systems to deliver you interesting content based on various algorithms for filtering. This includes:
- User profile: provide content based on a user’s browsing history and expressed preferences / “likes”
- Crowdsourced: provide content based on what most people like
- Social graph: provide content based on what your friends like
- Shared sources: provide content based on what people share online
- Influence: provide content based on what is shared by those who influence you the most
- Location: provide content depending on where you are
Depending on the tool, users have more or less control on filtering, such as excluding-including specific keywords. You can also simply discover interesting content while browsing. In this case, tools such as Pocket Read It Later allow you to add the web page to a cloud-based reading list. You can then consult your list on any of your devices, including offline, organize it and share it. After you have identified and set up your initial content sources, you have to periodically update your list with new ones while vetting or filtering more accurately those too broad or noisy ones. Several tools exist that that aggregate all of the content streams into one “master feed”. This makes it easier to manually filter and then organize content.
Organizing
The act of organizing and editing content remains essentially manual, i.e. it cannot be automated. Different types of media (text vs video, etc.) usually require different types of tools to organize them. Tasks at this stage include:
- Categorizing
- Tagging, typically by extracting keywords from the content
- Assigning content to a specific group, channel or collection, according to specific audiences
- Editing
- Re-titling
- Adding an intro and/or a summary. This can be considered as an essential task, considering that the goal of content curation is to save time.
- Commenting, including highlighting errors and overlooks
- Writing mashups, which combine the various views on a particular topic (Wikipedia can be seen as a collection of “collaborative” mashups)
- Linking to other resources
- Verifying sources and providing full credit
It should be noted, however, that the editing tasks mentioned above are mostly relevant for news-based content. A trainer will instead focus on organizing evergreen content, ideally as references along learning unit divides. He may also consider writing summaries and comments. In practice, a trainer may for example include a recently published study as a reference in chapter X of course Y, possibly providing a short overview of its key findings.
Sharing
There is a huge choice of tools to share content on the web. One of the most prominent ones is Twitter, which enables to post short messages / links, grouped by topic using tags. Its main strengths are speed and simplicity, allowing “hot” news to be shared quickly and easily. However, it is a tool for news-based content, with limited use for trainers. At this step, a typical curator will distribute his curated content on relevant online channels, such as social networks, a blog, a newsletter, a shared calendar, etc. The curator will also pay attention and react to feedback about his content. A trainer, on the other hand, will focus on presentation tools, rather than sharing tools (although most tools actually combine both features). Such tools may for example allow him to present information as a timeline, various sorts of mindmaps (ex. pearltrees), a collection of videos (ex. youtube channels) or pictures (ex. pinterest), charts (ex. google charts), infographics, or comparison tables (socialcompare), to name but a few. With all the great information found on internet, however, it is easy to forget that the whole point of content curation is to filter content. A trainer should exercise caution when he decides to add new content to his training. Does the content really add value? Is the content relevant for the learner? Is it redundant with already existing content? Sharing lots of content may make sense from a personal marketing perspective, to show one’s expertise. It may indeed be one of the key drivers for most curators. However, a trainer should refrain from dumping information on his students for narcissistic reasons.
Content curation tools
Here are two mind maps providing a number of content curation tools.