Curated Conversations in The Classroom: A Beginning (revised)

By Kyle Small -


Curation: A democratic practice that welcomes contributions from everyone, but not for everything. The curated conversation is not rapid response or open, but gathered, focused, and crafted in response to what stands in front of us. There is space to breathe, to wonder, but also freedom to listen trusting that we are going somewhere, together.


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Media, the distribution of messages and information, is a nearly ubiquitous "thing" that invades our every corner. Media is so strong and controlling that mentioning a popular or loaded concept draws confusion (and often debate) before one ever dons exploratory ears. Media, which is a difficult concept in its own right to define, has created an openness that welcomes too many "viruses" and too few conversations. 
There is something within the ubiquity that draws us in, that appears usable, and even, important. Steve Rosenbaum writes, "Mixed in with this cacophony of consumer content, there is contextually relevant material that needs to be discovered, sorted." Rosenbaum is speaking in regards to advertising and his pursuit of curation is different than here, yet I think his point on curation is helpful.....
I wonder if curation, or the curator, - the art and science of a museum - is one possible way to consider developing conversations that are educational, formational, and civil..... And based on the image below - the curator need not be an un-fun persona.... (this was taken from the Brown University Office of the Curator webpage (Rhode Island).
A curator in a museum welcomes everyone to come and see and even respond as the participant desires, yet the basis for response is set before them – the museum’s collection. Museum visitors trust the curator to create something that invites them in and invites response. The curator takes seriously his/her entrustment with this task. In this way, being an educator is curation. Clara Drummond, a young(er) curator in New York put it this way, ““Teaching is about engaging students by telling a good story and that’s what a good curator does, too.” Educators are persons entrusted to work diligently to frame content - to tell  a story, to invite response, and to honor the participants with substantive “art.”

Comments

  1. young Owen1:58 PM

    CEO of AOL used wired "curation" about 20 times in lunchtime panel today at Online News Association convention, taking the mid conference lead, but have not yet heard a speaker fail to use it at least twice, including in a session on e incivility of online commenting. Implication and inference: a key topic, and your moving it into education here is very interesting.

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  2. Kyle Small11:05 PM

    Owen,

    Thank you for the comment.

    I would be curious to know where and who unleashed the curation concept at your lunch today. I tried finding it on the website, but to no avail. What I am finding is that curation is used to describe what happens with things like flipboard and paper.li (which I just discovered the other day). I have a hard time calling this curation, as it is less of an "entrusted" task in the hands of a human and more of an "aggregated task" (which I still am trying to uncover the computer science behind aggregation). Anyway, I am enjoying the metaphor for now.

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  3. young Owen4:28 PM

    It was Tim Armstrong, the CEO of AOL. I just looked at the ONA Web site and did not find a transcript. I would say, however, that "curation" has been a buzzword for a few years now in many corners of the online community to describe how the editing discipline is applied to identifying other people's content worth linking to.

    I like Flipboard a lot, and several of my friends are using paper.li. I wouldn't call either of them curation as they are way more about making choices in advance about what to feature, or algorithmically interesting apps. I didn't call it curation in 1996, but I did have an employee on chicagotribune.com whose sole job was to find great stuff and link to it....sort of a news version of Site of the Day, which was very big in the 1993-1995 time frame when there were still just a few thousand sites on the Web.

    Anyhow, I do like the idea of curation in education too, and it essentially is one thing I do when I select readings from current books and periodicals to populate my syllabi.....

    o

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