This is a short blog post based on the notes I made during this session at the World of Learning Conference in October 2018. It may not be complete or totally accurate – it’s just what I took away.
This session was of particular interest. Not only do I know the speaker, Mike Shaw, a little, but curation is an increasingly important part of my role, so I wanted to see if there were any tips I could pick up to do it better!
Firstly, Mike explained what Curation is: Its about providing resources, not courses and helping people to create their own learning journeys, utilising a wide range of sources. He said that the role of L&D is to provide recommendations, but also encourage people to find their own… this exploration helps to aid the transfer of learning as they’ve invested time in finding and selecting it. Content that is provided on a plate may not always deliver the same levels of engagement.
In terms of HOW to curate, he suggested we follow the 3 S’s: Seek, Sense, Share.
- Seek – Look for content in many places, not just the ‘approved’ ones. Actively seek out views that may be different from your own. Don’t limit yourself to articles and TedTalks – look at you tube, trawl through social medias and consider podcasts. Good content is all around us, we just need to find it!
- Sense – Once found, you have triage this information and sense check it – is it credible? relevant? up to date? biased? Appropriate? (I once found a great video that turned into as religious sermon at the end, and another that was looking perfect until the presenter started swearing). You do need to check everything out! You also need to think about how you will contextualise it – things will need a bit of an intro so people are able to select the most useful resources for them. From experience, this is the element that is most time consuming.
- Share – Finally, you need to share it and publicise it – no-one will use the resources you’ve found if they don’t know they are there! You can do this via an LMS, or via more informal channels such as Slack, Yammer of Facebook groups. With one of my clients, I created a pdf document that provides context, links to the resources and then (crucially) asks people to do something with the information they’ve been provided with: a reflection or self-check question, or a suggested action helps people to learn.
Mike stressed that curation can be used by EVERYONE in the organisation – it can support social and peer-peer learning, and encourage a learning culture within the organisation. In fact, the more we can encourage people to add useful resources themselves, the more it will be used, and the more responsibility people will take for their own learning.
