If you’re an educator, the need to create educational content can sometimes take away time from other educational and organisational roles. Curating content, rather than creating it, has become a viable way to produce engaging, stimulating educational materials that present learners with clear information pathways. What exactly do we mean, however, when we talk about ‘curating’ educational content?
Curating is selecting and arranging to add value
In Michael Bhaskar’s Curation: The Book, the author talks about ‘the power of selection in a world of excess.’ In a world where there is so much high-value content freely available online (content that is available for re-licensing), creating new material isn’t always necessary. Digital technology has resulted in information overload, too. There is so much content available that it is harder than ever to digest all the information available for a given topic.
Curation, as Bhaskar points out, has always been a facet of intellectual work, from newspaper publishing to museum and gallery curation. If you think of how displays are curated in a museum, insightful items are arranged to convey a thought-provoking broader understanding of a topic (human history, for example). In a similar way, curating educational content gives you the power to arrange individual, high-quality items into an edifying whole; a whole that gives higher value as the sum of its parts.
Using print and digital resources to teach mathematics in South Africa
