This course will become read-only in the near future. Tell us at community.p2pu.org if that is a problem.
How many times have you tried to check a quick fact online and then lost an hour following links and checking unhelpful websites? The proliferation of paid search results and content mills makes it difficult to find what you want. Like traditional museum and gallery curators, digital curators acquire useful works and artifacts that fit into their collections. Influential tech evangelist Robert Scoble has said that content curation will be an essential 21st century digital skill.
An aggregator filters through the tons of content produced on the web and brings it together for you. Aggregators are the first line of defense against the white noise of the internet. They are helpful, but usually aren't very smart. If you are curating a list on tablet pc technology then the aggregator would probably also return results from archeology stories about stone tablets being discovered and similar uses of the word.
There are several ways to aggregate content. Paid services like GigaAlert and free services like Google Alert automatically track and monitor the web and alert you when something new has been posted that matches your search criteria. Most websites and blogs have RSS and Atom feeds, and you can use RSS readers, Google Reader, or most email clients to read posts from the site when they are updated. There are even social media aggregators that monitor Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks. Some content curation tools have built in aggregators (more on this in the next task). In addition to Google News, there are also many curated lists of news aggregators and tools.
Where will most of your content come from: news sites, blogs, content producer's websites, social media, academic journal databases?
Much of my content will come from univeristy or university affiliatied websites, however I am hopeful that I can also find personal images through flickr, pintrest, and other image storage sites. I also plan to use news and other commercial sites that may include USF images.
My content comes from social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, but also Stumbleupon and Pinterest, blogs I follow, online magazines and newspapers. I use Feedly to organize and filter content and Flibpboard and Paper.li to distribute it.
I would say most of my content comes from my own whimsy as I traipse through the landscape of the internet. I tend to shy away from official reporting. I follow content creators, editorials in the form of blogs and research articles/patents.
I’ve played with a bunch of self-aggregation tools—Paper.li, Scoop.it – not sure I am sold on any of them yet. Mostly I browse aggregators like Digg, elearninglearning and others to find content that I like, then I share or post the good stuff. I’ve written about some of these tools at http://rockidscience.com/?p=560
I have no idea where the resources will come from, but will probably use reading from assignments (academic journals) and google search. Looking forward to learning about new tools!
Content will come from twitter, linedin, facebook and other websites I've found useful.
I will need to set up new sources to find information. I am a new user when it comes to RSS, Twitter, with only a few discussion groups that I subscribe to, but guilty of not reading.
I use Google Reader for blog feeds. I also use Twitter follow professionals in my field who have presented at conferences and really impressed me. Some are active in the field of education while others are consultants or education websites and journals. There is so much information coming from these sources on a daily basis. My challenge is to filter out useless stuff or set aside what does not relate to my current topic so that I can focus on making the information useful.
I mostly use Google Reader, Goodreads and Twitter to aggregate information from different blogs.
I will likely combine multiple approaches.
Things I find randomly when browsing the web, from my tiwtter feed, Google Reader, Pinterest, my FB feed.
I have never used Google Alerts, so I think I will give that a try as well.
I use Google Alerts to aggregate information on the topics I am interested in.
I mostly use Google Reader to aggregate information from different blogs (general and specialised ones). For the topic I would like to curate, I'm probably going to use academic journals databases. Google Scholar provides some sort of Google Alert feature, which is related to the kind of articles you have already published. Although it sounds useful (it keeps you updated on what you are working), sometimes it's quite annoying, since you may want to keep updated into a topic you may have not published anything yet (or you have just published a little and the alerts are biased).
Some time ago I used delicious, but after its renewal, I moved on to pearltrees. I find Pearltrees a bit cumbersome, I mean, it is not very fluent to work with it.
I will be using content from-websites, blogs, pinterest, my twitter account, tumblr, specialized searching in google using boolean operators, databases
im taking a course in google searching called Power Searching at Google its free
the possbilities are endless.....
Hello everyone!
I use Google Reader to aggregate content from blogs, other websites, and academic journals. I use social media a lot. For Twitter I use Hootsuite streams together with hastags. In Facebook, apart from pages and groups it’s difficult to search for specific content and aggregate. Does anybody know a way to deal with Facebook?
I’m trying Google Alerts, with little success.
Paula
Tumblr is my aggregator. Since my blog content is visual and the tumblr dashboard gives me a peek into the posts of followers and followed is contributing more into the content. Apart from tumblr, I also use delicious and google.
I'm pretty familiar with facebook, and am beginning to explore twitter. I will find most of my information on the things already mentions, websites, blogs, academic jounrals and so on. I did go to listorious.com and snag some things for my twitter account. I will also find information in the hsitorical community.
I am an avid user of Twitter and moderate the Irish Educators Twitter hash tag conversation on Monday nights. Example of all previous chats can be seen here
I also tend to like to try out many other services and have set up a Google Reader account, but don't use it very much now, since Twitter.
I have set up Scoop.it and Pinterest, which I would like to use more as I am an art teacher and they seem like a great way to pull together info that I would be interested in.
I think it's not so much about being able to gather information together in one place, but you also need to be able to make it useful to yourself and then there's also the issue of sharing it out to others.
I'm interested in the video in part 1 of this course as it mentioned a lot of things I think would help and also clarified some ideas for me.
Fred.
Hello Fred,
You mentioned something very relevant: aggregating content is just one step to deal with the information flood, making it useful for your needs and sharing it is true curation ;-)
I use Google Alerts, am a member/participator of several mailing lists and groups, and use Google Reader/Feedly to read my 200+ RSS feeds. Also, I frequently visit my Facebook and Twitter account.
I think I'd like to use a mix of RSS feeds (google reader), twitter searches, library search, and consultation with a university librarian.
You are right, Doug. Librarians are great resources!
I think that building social contacts based on philosophical commonality will be an effective way to be introduced to content that you want in your collection. Supposing you had a collection, and you could find other people whose collections were noticeably similar or different, I suspect that some interesting conversations would spring up and valuable content could be derived from them. People with important similarities could find each other, network and share.
I agree with what you say:
"People with important similarities could find each other, network and share."
I think that's the power of a lot of the Web 2.0 services and tools that are appearing almost every day. They make it easy to connect to people with similar interests. I also like the idea of the serendipitous find too.
Fred.
