From Curation to Creation
Once again end of term has meant that more than a week has gone by without a blog post.
I spent a large majority of the day yesterday consolidating resources for a paper that I am writing. The process of consolidation allowed me to think about the role of curation in academic creation. In grad school there were many tools suggested to keep our sources together and our citations at hand; things like Refworks or MS Word Citations & Bibliography manager. However, with the proliferation of academic sources and other sources not in books or in journals the ability to keep all your sources in one place and easily accessible is of the utmost importance.
Bookmarking websites is one way to keep track of these sources but in the end what you are left with are a collection of urls which need to be revisited individually to engage with the material. Sadly, these urls also expire or the content is moved someplace else without a forwarding url. Curation tools allow scholars, journalists and students to collate and comment on sources as they are found through RSS feeds, Twitter feeds, or any other social media. Ultimately, what is required is a tool which will allow you to go from curation to creation seamlessly.
At the moment I am experimenting with Evernote as a curation tool. I know that many use Storify in order to create stories and delineate links between sources. I like Evernote because as I tag individual sources as they come through I can also take notes on these sources which I can easily import into a Word document when I am writing an article or a paper. Also Evernote allows me to save the article itself even if the url eventually becomes dead.What I also like about Evernote is the portability factor. I have the app on my smart phone so I can access links and notes to sources even if I am away from my laptop. This coupled with my Dropbox gives me access to what I need in meetings if I happen to forget to put a file on a USB.
However, I also know that there are places where Evernote fails to be as effective as it could be as a curation tool. I am also guilty of failing to hashtag my posts on Twitter as diligently as I should, which makes the curation process that much more difficult. I am making a conscientious effort to make sure I hashtag tweets in the future.
Recently, a lot has been said about ifttt as well as Pinterest as curation tools. Ifttt is becoming a thorn in my side mainly because society is facing a then/than crisis of massive proportions. It seems as though very few people know the difference between the meaning of the word "then" and the meaning of the word "than." So many tweets are calling for a "if this than that" revolution that it makes me want to pull my hair out every time. Ifttt, for the record, stands for "if this THEN that" and if ifttt can do nothing but enlighten people on the differences between then and than I will be a happy educator indeed.
I am always curious of what tools people use to keep track of sources. I would love it if you would share your curation stories. What has worked for you? What hasn't? Are there some tools which work better for some topics and not others?
I spent a large majority of the day yesterday consolidating resources for a paper that I am writing. The process of consolidation allowed me to think about the role of curation in academic creation. In grad school there were many tools suggested to keep our sources together and our citations at hand; things like Refworks or MS Word Citations & Bibliography manager. However, with the proliferation of academic sources and other sources not in books or in journals the ability to keep all your sources in one place and easily accessible is of the utmost importance.
Bookmarking websites is one way to keep track of these sources but in the end what you are left with are a collection of urls which need to be revisited individually to engage with the material. Sadly, these urls also expire or the content is moved someplace else without a forwarding url. Curation tools allow scholars, journalists and students to collate and comment on sources as they are found through RSS feeds, Twitter feeds, or any other social media. Ultimately, what is required is a tool which will allow you to go from curation to creation seamlessly.
At the moment I am experimenting with Evernote as a curation tool. I know that many use Storify in order to create stories and delineate links between sources. I like Evernote because as I tag individual sources as they come through I can also take notes on these sources which I can easily import into a Word document when I am writing an article or a paper. Also Evernote allows me to save the article itself even if the url eventually becomes dead.What I also like about Evernote is the portability factor. I have the app on my smart phone so I can access links and notes to sources even if I am away from my laptop. This coupled with my Dropbox gives me access to what I need in meetings if I happen to forget to put a file on a USB.
However, I also know that there are places where Evernote fails to be as effective as it could be as a curation tool. I am also guilty of failing to hashtag my posts on Twitter as diligently as I should, which makes the curation process that much more difficult. I am making a conscientious effort to make sure I hashtag tweets in the future.
Recently, a lot has been said about ifttt as well as Pinterest as curation tools. Ifttt is becoming a thorn in my side mainly because society is facing a then/than crisis of massive proportions. It seems as though very few people know the difference between the meaning of the word "then" and the meaning of the word "than." So many tweets are calling for a "if this than that" revolution that it makes me want to pull my hair out every time. Ifttt, for the record, stands for "if this THEN that" and if ifttt can do nothing but enlighten people on the differences between then and than I will be a happy educator indeed.
I am always curious of what tools people use to keep track of sources. I would love it if you would share your curation stories. What has worked for you? What hasn't? Are there some tools which work better for some topics and not others?
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