I enjoy and endorse the rabbit chase; I think part of the joy of collecting is the anticipation and suspense of going somwhere. Another part of that same joy comes from looking back at the path I've traveled and holding in my mind with wonder, humor, curiosity, and irreverence. Sharing or presenting what I've found or made is a way to process those feelings, to internalize and habituate them, and to offer them up for whatever they are worth in a kind of thanks to what I found.
When I curate resources for students, I feel least joyful when I go into it with intent - when I know what I want to find, where to find it, and how to share it out. I am much happier discovering things in my own wanderings that make me say to myself - that! Bring that to class for this student or that one! She will love it - or it will help him.
I struggle with the last few moments of the video when Popova et al. transform curating from being aware of the connections between things they discover into finding the right ideas and answers that will either save us all or proove (that we are the) best (arbiters of taste).
Here is how I discovered something and how you could possibly discover something important to you, too seems more interesting, exciting, and authentic to me than here is what I discovered and here is why it should matter to you. (School, school, school Sansing - come off it!)
Is curation about indentifying and championing the text or other artifact, or it is about habituating the self and a community to connection-making? I'm sure it's about both depending on the situation - no one wants my journey of self-discovery on the way to figuring out how to type a letter so it has an umlaut (except maybe Bud).
While I don't think that any of the mission-driven curators in the video are necessarily in it for what they would identify as self-aggrandizement, I am wary of curating as gate-keeping. The purpose of curation, in my mind, is connection making. The purpose is to help others see that they, too, can gain awareness over their lives and make connections that let them make discoveries about themselves and the world.
Discovery is a more powerful emotional and cognitive act than reception. As someone might follow a path I found, does the path help and encourage them to annotate it better? To go further? To go on a tangent?
How can (or how does) curation inspire curation? How do we differentiate curation for folks who draw implicit insipriation from it, as well as for folks who don't see themselves as curators while touring someone else's answers?
I kind of think of the Internet as the collection. I don't think it's too full. I think remembering the paths - the mental muscle memories of a search or journey - is more necessary to impvosiation, contextual, and human curation than remembering the answers is.
What do you think?