Abstract:

Collective knowledge is the objective of teaching and learning in high education and/or in a more focused way in research groups or corporate settings.
In both contexts, amount of information, through scientific published material and through social media networks is more and more overwhelming and the term “infobesity” has been coined for information overload. Furthermore, collective knowledge polluted by fake news in populations with low health literacy can have public health consequences inducing for instance vaccination hesitancy. Inadequate collective knowledge and intelligence acquired in high education settings might also have long term consequences for the country workforce.

In high education, teachers have to help students and trainees managing information as soon as possible, either through finding, reading, evaluating, and understanding particularly for writing scientific papers for master and PhD degrees. This training should be mandatory for research based professions in universities and medical schools but also in corporate settings.

Content curation tools could help teachers and students accomplish these activities and develop their digital and information literacies, mandatory in future professional life and life-long learning.

Based on the use of one of those content curation tools, Scoop.it, we will illustrate the potential of the method with various examples in diverse fields of knowledge: Immunology as basic and medical discipline; Geography as science of spatial attributes and interrelationships of earth phenomena; Lighting Industry for economic, technical and marketing intelligence.

Using content curation, snippets of open information can be collected, gathered and selected from publication databases, press information and social networks. They can be editorialized and elevated by the curators, teachers and/or learners with tags, personal comments, links and attractive imaging features.

As individuals and/or in groups of interest, and/or professional networks, curators can build open or closed searchable personal or collective content hubs. They will enrich those hubs over time and share them with their communities of interest.

Using content curation, students learn to read and write in a high education and research environment. They can build their own portfolio of learning materials and improve their digital and information literacy.

Using content curation, teachers can offer students their expertise for selection of relevant material. Researchers can interact with colleagues of similar interest, become thought leaders and will find sometimes serendipitously new research subjects. Professionals will participate in company collective intelligence while pursuing personalized life-long learning.

Compared to algorithms, content curation adds human specialist competencies for knowledge management, which might be also the limit of the method if curators are not persistent and willing to share.

Nevertheless, usage of content curation tools offers the opportunity to develop and manage knowledge content hubs relevant for information literacy of teachers, learners and trainees and useable for strategic individual or collective decisions.

Keywords:

Content curation, scoop.it, collective knowledge, immunology, geography, lighting industry.