Curation as an essential practice

I am currently involved with a Knowledge Management Honneurs group of students as a guest lecturer. One of their assigments is to contribute a Wiki page that demonstrates the role of an information curator.  An information curator is described as someone who continually finds, groups, organises and shares the best and most relevant publications on a specific issue online.

Nancy White sets a good example as a curator, also with regards to curating the record and summaries of events. In this way the information is not lost in cyberspace. Two interesting recent examples are -

• My Network Curates My Tool Choices
•  Community for the 21st Century Harvest

There are also various interesting curation tools that is showing up out there, such as Storify (see Uprising in Egypt: Feb. 05, 2010) and Summify. These integrates various modalities such as Twitter feeds, videos, blogs etc.  paper.li is an aggregator that ‘ organizes links shared on Twitter and Facebook into an easy to read newspaper-style format’, e.g. The WWF_Climate Daily. It updates on a regular basis and hence it is not a curation tool in the true sense.

The KM4Dev community is an exemplar of vibrant sharing. There main mechanism is a mailing list since many of the members are located in low-bandwith areas. The agreement in this community is to summarise relevant discussion on the KM4Dev wiki – also a form of curation. The following extract from the KM4Dev Wiki front page describes this practice -

“Our first project on the KM4Dev wiki was the [Community Knowledge] area, (formerly called the FAQTory ( FAQ Index)- a place to make and use FAQs and information pages out of our knowledge surfaced in our online conversations and from member experiences. This project gives us a chance to co-edit, created linked pages as background resources and play with a new tool. We encourage you to look around and play with us.”

A good example of such curation is the wiki page on Brown bag lunches -

“This discussion was sparked by a question: “ideas for a short (e.g. 45min) brown bag lunch type session, aiming to share information about a particular piece of work ongoing within a large (newly formed) team,in a way that encourages discussion and thought about potential internal synergies, during the lunch break.”"

It is interesting to see how curation manifest as a blog post, a wiki page or a storify page. Each of these afford different dynamics and value.

More links about information curation available in my shared bookmarks in Diigo.

**** Addition on 17 May 2011 ****

 

Knowledge Society, knowledge troubadours and social artists

And once again from two very different parts of my network, there are themes that are flowing together. This time it is the link between knowledge troubadours and social artists.

At our Knowledge Conversation last night with Prof Fanie de Beer he posits that the Knowledge Worker is somebody who knows and somebody who connects. And this knowing and connecting is within intelligent communities which he sees as communities that invents worlds of shared meaning. He then also put forward that without the human being as knower and sharer/connector there is no Knowledge Society. This also necessitates that we need to contemplate and think about the knower and the sharer.

As knowers, we need to be knowledge troubadours. The troubadour search, navigate, travel to find new themes, and connect these themes, and present/communicate these in such a way that others could find meaning from it.The knowledge troubadour does not only detect and communicate knowledge links, the knowledge troubadour also invent linkages between knowledges.The knowledge troubadour engages in ongoing conversation, and by engaging in this ongoing conversation community is cultivated. Conversation is connecting and relating.

Prof de Beer then also introduced the notion of ‘connaisance’ (a term for knowledge in French). In the Knowledge Society, we are born together through our acts of knowing and connecting.

And, as can be anticipated, the first question from the ‘circle’ was – How do we get people to connect and share, since this is not natural to them? Conversation, as mentioned earlier is connecting and relating. The centrality of connecting and relating also place a focus on the importance of the role of social artists and transversal persons  - concepts I am learning about from Nancy White. This is how Nancy describes a social artist and the transversal person -

” A social artist is that person who helps create that space for people to interact and learn with each other. It is about noticing the human dynamic of what happens when we think together, learn together, play together and the idea has been articulated most recently by Etienne Wenger in the context of communities of practice. But.. for me the social artist is a role that happens in all sorts of contexts and it certainly happens in networks… interested in the different roles in these sort off loosely formed roles in these ecosystems of people for learning, and working, and doing….playing with the idea of the social artist along with the person who is working the transveral. So, the social artist is looking into creating that space between people who are interacting and the transversal person is connecting that wonderful, juicy, whatever that  is happening – learning, working, playing, with some of the other things that is in the ecosystem, like the organisation, hierarchy, I’m not sure what else. I think if we ignore those transversal connections we run into lots of problems… recognising the we live in a world where there is many actors and many forms… at least knitting little bits of them together sometimes…”

Transcript from (http://dtlttoday.com/71/).

In our society, which we often speak of as the Knowledge Society, we need knowledge troubadours connecting themes and knowledges , and social artists connecting people in moments of interacting and learning within ecosystems, and the transversal person connecting these moments and knowledges with other things in the ecosystem. Thus living in intelligent communities that are constituted by collective intelligences (another note from Prof de Beer’s conversation).

These two concepts inspired me so much that I am blogging this after a silence of almost five months:).

 

We choose…

to be too busy to share

to be too busy to learn

to be too busy to reflect

to be too busy to slow down

to be too busy to network

to be too busy to find work-life balance

 

 

New on my e-bookshelf

* The New Social Learning – a guide to transforming organisations through social media (Tony Bingham & Marcia Conner)
* En nu online- sosiale media for professionals, organisaties and facilitatoren (Joitske Hulsebosch; Sibrenne Wagenaar)
* User Adoption Strategies – Shifting second wave people to new collaboration technology (Michael Sampson)
* Researching your own practice: the discipline of noticing (John Mason)
* Informal learning – rediscovering the natural pathways that inspire innovation and performance (Jay Cross)

 

Making 2.0 real and relevant – lets play…

In an earlier post I mentioned an initiative we are embarking on in which we will utilise social reporting as a catalyst to encourage the relevant adoption and active use/participation of 2.0 software by researchers and to influence a realistic attitude towards such tools.

The proposition is that such a social reporting assignment will provide an opportunity for experiential learning. It will also provide a real experience that will afford a conversation about 2.0 based on real experiences. In The New Social Learning, the authors reminds us that we need to have a sense of play. We need to “experiment with new ideas, learn by trying and doing rather than expecting the first piece of content you contribute to be perfect. A sense of play adds a personal, lighthearted tone to a space, even those used primarily for work related collaboration. It just sets the tone and helps maintain an environment that feels authentic, personal and human.”

In A New Culture of Learning: cultivating the imagination for a world of constant change, Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown provides an insightful perspective on play as a modality for learning.

“Play creates a context in which information, ideas and passions grow.”

“Children use play and imagination as the primary mechanisms for making sense of their new, rapidly evolving world. In other words, as children encounter new places, people, things, and ideas, they use play and imagination to cope with the massive influx of information they receive.”

But, it is not just a case of unleashing people in the 2.0 world. This is often the case with some 2.0 training sessions – people learn about ‘driving’ the tools, but are still not able to make sense of ‘doing 2.0′ and participating in 2.0. Inherent to play is that it provides “a bounded and structures environment that allows for unlimited agency to build and experiment with things within those boundaries.” The Social Reporting assignment provides such a bounded and structured environment – there is a purpose, goal, and tasks to accomplish as a team.

The authors also states that in the context of gaming, connections are also build about something that is concrete – accomplishment and shared experiences that bring people together and motivate them. This was evident from the feedback received from the Addis ShareFair 2010 Social Reporting team (see also (also http://blog.sharefair.net/2010/10/agknowledge-africa-share-fair-les-jeux.html)

The 2.0 world is indeed a new and rapidly evolving world that requires some degree of experimentation and experiences during which people make sense of and try different approaches to see what feels comfortable to them, and get a return that will (hopefully) encourages them.

This will not be merely a training course where we teach researchers about the 2.0 world. The focus will be on creating experiences where the researchers can learn through engagement within the world, and also build connections about something that is concrete. We are hoping to make 2.0 real and relevant.