Terminology Tuesday: Content Curation

Woowee! This week I decided to tackle the term ‘content curation’ as I recently used the term ‘curating’ incorrectly and it created a bit of confusion. I was looking to develop a list of resources for a personal library of sorts – resources which I could consult, when necessary, to clear the air about Instructional Design related issues. However, what I actually meant was that I wanted to ‘collect’ or ‘compile’ a list of resources, not curate.

So what’s the difference?

Content curation can be considered the process of compiling content from all over the net (or even online), and then presenting that content to a larger audience in a meaningful way.  Just like museum curators – content curators often work around a them (e.g. Instructional Design or Ancient Egypt…) and track down all of best, most relevant content they can find, and display the content in a manner that renders the content most effective. Content curation also reminds me a little bit of the poster boards you developed as a kid when presenting information to your classmates – you were given a theme, and tasked with teaching your classmates about that theme using visual and textual content – curated from many resources.

Compiling or collecting content is essentially just creating a list of resources which you can consult at a later time. I would liken this to the bookmarking functionality of any web browser. For example, I bookmarked a fantastic looking recipe for making quinoa guacamole. I will be consulting this reference this evening when I make dinner for my family. Another example is Pinterest. Now, I feel as though Pinterest walks a fine line between curating and collecting, because the content is being presented to an audience…just not necessarily within a meaningful way; however, content is being collected, and many individuals use Pinterest to house this ‘found’ content, as a library of sorts, for consultation at a later time.

So while I’m having a very face-palm morning when it comes to content curation and content compilation, you no longer have to! I hope this week’s edition of Terminology Tuesday cleared the air for you. It certainly helped me out!