I propose that the department increase its usage of
online curation tools.
Curation is a staple of the digital experience is a big part of popular online services like Pinterest and Flickr, YouTube’s Playlists, and Diigo. With Google+, one can even curate and organize their friends. For academic purposes, curation can be up-to-the-minute crowdsourced research on a student’s topic of choice.
Traditional sources for curated content include academic journals and printed books. These resources are invaluable to much literary study and analysis by providing context for the work and to bring people into the conversations surrounding the work. However, an individual must often go to a library, a store, or (more recently) subscribe to an costly online database like JSTOR to access these treasures. If they use a library, they cannot make notes in the book to help themselves process its contents and pick out what parts are useful. Additionally, since these traditional sources and the usual ways of finding them involve few if any human sources to recommend the best titles, what the student does access may be an off-target, barely relevant, or simply incomplete resource for the topic at hand.
The department and its students would greatly benefit by have students research and curate together using online tools. If two students are studying similar topics, digital curation will help them easily access each other’s research as well as the research and resource recommendations of tens of other amateurs, students, and scholars. With a more efficient and current research system, students will use the curation tools of the digital age to become more knowledgeable scholars and analysts in their fields of interest, leading to lifelong learning and teaching.
Curation is a staple of the digital experience is a big part of popular online services like Pinterest and Flickr, YouTube’s Playlists, and Diigo. With Google+, one can even curate and organize their friends. For academic purposes, curation can be up-to-the-minute crowdsourced research on a student’s topic of choice.
Traditional sources for curated content include academic journals and printed books. These resources are invaluable to much literary study and analysis by providing context for the work and to bring people into the conversations surrounding the work. However, an individual must often go to a library, a store, or (more recently) subscribe to an costly online database like JSTOR to access these treasures. If they use a library, they cannot make notes in the book to help themselves process its contents and pick out what parts are useful. Additionally, since these traditional sources and the usual ways of finding them involve few if any human sources to recommend the best titles, what the student does access may be an off-target, barely relevant, or simply incomplete resource for the topic at hand.
The department and its students would greatly benefit by have students research and curate together using online tools. If two students are studying similar topics, digital curation will help them easily access each other’s research as well as the research and resource recommendations of tens of other amateurs, students, and scholars. With a more efficient and current research system, students will use the curation tools of the digital age to become more knowledgeable scholars and analysts in their fields of interest, leading to lifelong learning and teaching.
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