Curation? And a plan!

I want to do something meaningful for my tech ed class, which has a wide open, student driven project (or two) so I decided to see if there was interest among my cohort to start an online middle years book club.  There was.  Significant interest.  We held a quick introductory meeting and almost everyone who aspires to teach that age group attended along with several people that are interested in the younger grades.  Wow.  Our cohort is very keen to gather great resources and to share the work of doing so.  Exciting stuff.

Next step is to figure out how to turn this into a tech ed endeavour.  I spoke to my prof and she introduced the idea of "curation".  I knew that a curator is someone responsible for collections in a museum or library but I was woefully ignorant about digital curation though I now think that Facebook and Wikipedia are both forms of curation because they store data that is constantly growing and changing.

I did some "research" into digital curation (okay, I looked it up on Wikipedia) and found the following to be helpful.  A good approach to digital curation is to: 

1) conceptualize - what kind of digital material will we be creating?

2) create - produce the data that we will be storing. 

3) access and use.

For our purposes, this will consist of our cohort (and beyond?) reviewing middle years resources and sharing teaching ideas with one another.  For now, we have decided to manage our book club as a blog (PDPPPosse Resource Club on blogspot) but this may have to change to manage more data.  

Now I put it to you, both of my readers:  any ideas for a curation platform?  

Reluctant baby steps

Seldom have I experienced such academic frustration and total incomprehension of a subject.  Today I sat in my EdTech class feeling like it was being taught in another language.  Feeling, in fact, like it might be rocket science.  No fault of my professor.   It's just that I am a 1970's and 80's educated person who learned the Queen's English (the 80 something year old Queen's English) which doesn't include words like "diigo" or "twitter" or "livebinders.com".  I am wading through a thick fog of this strange new language feeling overwhelmed and disoriented.

But here's what I have gleaned so far:  in order to become connected with the best and biggest possible resource there is, it would behoove me to become versed in twitter.  I hate that I am starting to see the value in it but . . . I am starting to see the value in it.  I am only just beginning to figure out how to use truly excellent online resources and connect with some innovative educators that are sharing with each other, freely and generously using this medium.   

Today I made some tentative wobbly baby steps.  I connected f2f (which for people of my generation means face to face) with a teacher friend of mine, picked his brain and pilfered from his twitter community to find a few people to follow.  I spent a quick half hour looking through some of their tweets in a fairly aimless way and became overwhelmed by the sheer volume of good stuff out there.  The next small step will be to try to bring focus to my "twitter time" and to determine how to meaningfully expend energy finding resources (including technology) that will be helpful to me as a teacher.