I like to read and review articles in which a new term or concept is being introduced, to make sure that we are not exposed when talking to Learning & Development professionals. I personally try - not always successfully - to resist the temptation to say that new concepts are in fact not new at all, but are instead merely the recycling of old principles under a new label. And, sure enough, as I read the first few paragraphs of this article, I could not see that 'curation' was anything new or relevant. Surely curating is something done by museum staff, rather than anything to do with Learning & Development.
The
article starts with some quite obvious stuff about putting the learner at the
centre of the Learning & Development Universe, which it is hard to argue with and is nothing
new. But soon we learn exactly what 'to
curate' really is - the use of skills, experience, knowledge and familiarity
with the organisation to sift through the enormous amount of data that is now available
and make it easily accessible to the learner.
This involves making connections and thinking laterally to select and
evaluate the relevance of each potential element of content.
Again I
had to restrain myself from asking - and answering yes to - the question; isn’t
this what all course designers do every time they decide upon content for a
tailored learning programme? However,
the article moves on to make the point that, whatever the answer to that
question, the competency of curation has become much more important now that
the development of the Internet and digital media has increased the potential
information sources many times over.
There is
then a detailed description of a number of on-line tools that enable curation to
take place in the modern media context - 'Scoop-it', 'Diigo' and 'RSS' are
mentioned. These would be known to my
more media savvy colleagues at MTP but to me the references only served to confirm
that there is a different world out there that I do not fully understand. Apparently the tools allow the user to create
a series of topics from a wide range of data so that each one can be offered to
learners, based on their roles and competency needs.
It is
however argued that the technical tools cannot carry out the complete curation
process. Tools can achieve what the
authors call 'aggregation' - the
collection of the data - and the filtering
process which selects what is relevant for a particular need. But it was reassuring to hear that the final
stage of elevation - putting the
information in context and deciding its importance - is a skill which requires
human judgment.
This
human aspect of the curation competency is then defined in more detail and my
reaction moved back to my earlier thoughts about this being a new label for a
traditional skill. You need curiosity -
a verbal link to curation that I had not realised before - the ability to
relate to your audience, understanding of business objectives and the ability
to engage learners effectively. But the
authors make the valid point that, in the modern environment, the learning
professional needs to combine these skills with the ability to access data on
the internet and use tools that can
aggregate and filter. The authors
mention a model by Harold Jarche which suggests that curation requires learning
designers to ‘seek, sense and share’ as an instinctive competency, combining
traditional learning design skills with modern technology.
It is
also confirmed that the curation competency is not something that can be
acquired overnight. The required
combination of technical and personal skills is only likely to be found in an
experienced learning professional who understands the online tools and applies
them in practice. And the learning
designs that evolve look nothing like conventional learning programmes; it is
more about helping target audiences to develop their own skills of independent
learning, enabling them to find their way to relevant content, using a range of
social media and information links.
This
article is certainly thought provoking, particularly for those like me who are
more comfortable with traditional media and the tried and tested approaches to
learning design. It reveals a different
language and mindset. I believe however
that it may go too far in its suggested transformation at this stage of
development. Most of the learning
professionals that we meet do not want to go there yet. But they are constantly talking about the
need for ‘bite sized’ learning modules and we are now working on the
development of ‘Interactive Podcasts’ which select key learning needs and
convert these into short and engaging learning experiences. I did not previously realise that this is
curation but now I do.
I would
recommend that those for whom this is new should read the full article. Curation may simply be a new label for a
traditional Learning & Development skill but the authors make an excellent job of showing
its relevance to the modern context.
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