Curation

With the explosion of user generated content (UGC) on the web, there is growing need for tools that assemble and collect these artifacts along a similar theme. Consider this to the old days you spent in the library searching the ERIC database in order to find articles related to your research proposal. Times have changed and now we can let our digital tools do the work for us. Curation tools is a set of tools that scrubs the web for content related to your search criteria and adds it to the collection, or learning platform thus the end user has access to a collection of digital artifacts on a central theme.

Curation is the art of searching, selecting, sharing and or bookmarking, tagging, organizing information. Curation is about adding value and optimizes the search and archive process. Curation is at the core of gathering information..which is central to the research process. Curation and the potential for publishing a curation project thus has links to OER and textbook publishing since the new collections of information source are formed. These tools are a threat to traditional publishers as subject matter experts as they can form their own subject matter collections which can then be manipulated in the future, similar to many OER materials.

The interesting part is that curation also adds more human intervention than a Google search. It certainly saves time to search but assembly still requires your input for developing meaningful content.

Here is a list of some **curation tools** around a specific purpose.

Courseload -provides digital textbooks to the masses ScoopIt - topic centered, social media content Themeefy - create your own magazine with content Mentor Mob - Start creating your own mentor mob stream of content Jog-the-web - One of the early pioneers of pulling websites together to present new content, can include your own LiveBinders - another collection of website links to assemble content on a central theme Scrible - great for research and share parts of the web Pearltrees - cultivate the web Bag the Web - curate your own web contents and bag it for future use CapturetoCloud - perhaps more of a cloud storage device, capture all your materials and store online. ShowYou - lots of ways to curate video content iUniv is a great social repository of video from many universities... some great topics Shelfster - capture the web Kno - gather any electronic text

Additionally, there are some related sites that allow you to catalog links and multiple other sources into a single page or dashboard for easy access. These tools are more for links than actual content but serves the purpose of curating links to content.

Symaballo - gather content and links form the web and post into a single interface NetVibes - an intelligent dashboard to organize your content Bootlenose - a way to gather information form the social network


 * Curation and Direction of OER**

Curation, aggregation and sustainability in OER and broader open learning content is the heart of the matter. As we have seen we are shifting our consumerism away from the traditional textbooks, moving past the markers for digitizing content, as simply being not good enough towards curation of the open learning content for more personalized learning model to meet specific needs. Although the description of tools and processes to achieve the end goals may vary greatly, the direction appears to be set.

There are some general questions that need to be addressed when we look at open learning content;
 * 1) Which group(s) of users should be the ultimate audience/target for OER?
 * 2) What kind of ongoing time and effort commitment will faculty and/or institutions be willing to make regarding OER?
 * 3) Is there sufficient usage of current OER projects to warrant use in teaching and learning?
 * 4) Is there enough momentum to sustain open content projects?
 * 5) What might entice for-profit groups to consider long-term partnerships with OER projects?

The ultimate factor is whether OER is sustained, depends upon ease of use, the viability of curation tools and ability to aggregate suitable learning content for the end users. Sustainability about market penetration and demand for these open learning content. This means creating greater consumer awareness and developing mechanisms of convenient consumption.

Its not just about OER, free open learning content online, there seems to be just a small shift for education online in general. We have more services, roles and specific functions that education can largely be conducted online. As long as schools have bandwidth there is a plethora of opportunities that follow the hosted subscription based model. Follow this link for more.The fact we are seeing more blended learning in K12 institutions is a result of greater access and value of virtual learning opportunities, free resources and ease of use and its inclusion into traditional learning environments.
 * Online education**

OER Glue sticks together OER resources and adapts them to create your own courses.

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 * References**