Curate your own Learning

Social media is behind all of this. You can retweet and curate resources other people have shared. My Scoop-it Making Learning Personal made it all clear to me where we are going with learning. All of us can be curators of our own learning.

It’s easy to set up your Scoop-it.

Dashboard: Your dashboard keeps track of the activity:

• Topic of the Day (whoever is the most active)
• What’s New (your friends who started a new topic)
• your Curated Topics (you can have as many as you want)
• Trending Topics (most active topics)
• Your Community (links to people who you may be following or who are following you or who have the same tags)
• Your Stats (number of posts and views)
• Connect to social media (you choose which ones you want to connect to)
• Link to your profile (keeps track on the progress of your scoop-it and the topics you follow)
  

Curate: Review suggested content and Scoop-it!
Scoop-it uses the tags you suggested to find sources from other curators. You then either remove the source, discard it (not sure of the difference yet) or Scoop-it! Your latest scoop appears in your Scoop-it which you can use the move feature to move it where you want it on the page.

Explore: Review what’s new on the 5 topics you follow.
Scoop-it uses your tags to find resources with the same tags. You can then rescoop any of the resources.

Another social media tool that lets you curate your learning is Pearltrees that is a social curation community using a visual map. Just signed up so will be learning and sharing more.



This is the first step for learners to own their learning. They get to choose the resources, but I see a problem. It’s easy to just choose anything that maybe relates to your topic. When you do a Google search, the robots and spiders return millions of resources based on your search. Using your tags Scoop-it and Pearltrees retrieve resources where others have used those tags. I’m finding I’m receiving lots of resources that have nothing to do with my tags. So I need to be very discerning and careful about reviewing the resource to make sure it is relevant to my topic.

Let’s be real. Will young learners really do this well? This is a skill we will need to teach learners. How to be a critical curator!

I see the need for a personal guide on the side. This is where teachers, librarians, counselors, and peers as student experts could support learners. Been thinking about this for some time. I’m a coach. Designed a coaching community (My eCoach), and see the need for some type of coach, guide or curator to your curating. Even with a guide, learners will need a new skill:

critical curating skills