Flintoff, Mellow and Picket (2014) have noted an increase in the amount of digital tools available to creators and curators for digital curation, that quickly and easily meets the needs of users and digital creation.
Flintoff, Mellow and Picket note the amount of digital curation tools that are freely available online; these include sites/applications such as, Pinterest, Learnist, Pearltrees, Storify (no longer available), BagTheWeb, Scoop It and Flipboard.
Through an adapted checklist designed by De Rossi and Good (2010), Flintoff, Mellow and Picket have identified a list of attributions that define a good curation tool. They are as follows:
- Aggregate and gather web pages specific to the topic,
- Filter content allows the curator to select the best material,
- Publish to your collection with ease,
- Share, syndicate and distribute to your audience and the wider community,
- Allow the curator to edit and add comments as well as providing a comment stream for the audience to nurture discussion around the article,
- Analytics so you can track the usage of the site,
- An export facility or a way to backup the curated work.
These digital curation tools not only allow for use in an educational context for teachers and TL’s, but also has the potential for students to:
- Improve their own critical appraisal of information,
- Build a resource that can be used beyond their studies,
- Collaborate and share these resources with their disciplinary peers,
- Engage more broadly across a topic, often encountering leading edge research and developments that can be overlooked in general undergraduate studies.
Flintoff, K., Mellow, P. & Pickett Clark, K. (2014). Digital curation: Opportunities for learning, teaching, research and professional development. In Transformative, innovative and engaging. Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Teaching Learning Forum, 30-31 Jan. 2014, Perth: The University of Western Australia.
De Rossi, L. C. & Good, R. (2010). The 15 basic traits of a news / content curation system. http://www.masternewmedia.org/real-time-news-curation-the-complete-guide-part-6-the-tools-universe/#ixzz2Voik0DTw