Article 7: Innovations in Education

Before reading this article, I had not heard of "content curation" before. As a student in the B.Ed program, I've saved and organized resources useful for teaching, but this "collection" never left my computer. The wealth of information available through the Internet certainly makes collecting much easier. In the search for resources, I often came across websites that gathered linked resources. I also participated in a Dropbox folder for French resources with my cohort, and although we shared the information with the goal of helping each other in our teaching, I don't think we really had a specific focus on inquiry. I'm still not sure whether these cases would be considered "curating", though. The author emphasizes curating as a shared, continuous process of inquiry, but doesn't provide concrete examples of what exactly this looks like.

Curating starts from inquiry and gives context to information by determining how each added "piece" further answers the initial research question. I love the idea of teaching students to become curators--in some way, I think I am learning to do this through this course (through my blog and as I take notes on the different resources and how I could use them in my practice). In this case, perhaps the purposeful inquiry part has something to do with evaluating each new resource through the eyes of a FSL teacher. Doing so gives added meaning each resource "added" to the collection. I could get students to create a network of blogs with French resources (such as for vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation) where they include samples of how they've used them to enhance their learning in the course. In this way, they'd learning to search for and evaluate information, apply it, and share it with others in a meaningful way. Like Mr. Coley's podcasts, this network could also benefit other French learners.