Abstract:

Social media is traditionally defined as a plurality of Web applications supporting creating and exchange of user-generated content. In this paper, we give to this phenomenon more general understanding. We consider the Social media as a cultural phenomenon, enhancing interpersonal communication and changing the nature of relationship between an individual and society. In Web 2.0, that is a technological basis of social media, possible forms of network activity are social networks, blogs, forums, wikis, etc. Digital curation is one of the most innovative types of the social media. The curation is a specific form of blogging, in which one receives an input stream of data generated according to a predefined set of keywords, and then carries out his/her own filtering by selecting messages around specific topic, which in the curator's opinion are of interest and are "worthy" to be included in his/her personal "curation blog". The result of "individual curation" is the curated stream of content. Different curated streams interact thus forming meaningful networks. In turn, meta-curation is considered as a management of the curated streams. A meta-curator directs the streams in a desirable direction, according to the aim of the lesson. The curation phenomenon is a natural result of the evolution of learning activities in the classroom.

Indeed:
- In a traditional class, the process goes from observation to forming the content, then to an oral and written statement of the content in a form of presentation or composition.
- In a post-industrial class, the process goes from learning materials, and web surfing to analysis and storing the content, and leads to the curation.

We consider the curation as an excellent educational activity in the postindustrial class, which perfectly corresponds to the present stage of social media.
In a conventional graduate seminar class, reading and documenting research papers is the main course requirement. Usually students perform a small-scale research, participate in a class colloquium, give an oral presentation and submit a final work. We assume that all the above activities are irrelevant in a social media era. Intensive using the “copy-paste” action decreases the value of documenting; outstanding “cosmetic” features of the presentation software turn the learning to the advertising. Fortunately, Web 2.0 opens great opportunities to improve the learning process. Instead of the reading, documenting and presenting data, students curate the content; their teacher becomes the meta-curator.
We conduct our study in a group of MA students’ participating in a research seminar. Scoop (http://www.scoop.it/) is used as a curation tool. Each of participants curates his research topic. He/she selects, collects, tags, comments and shares materials enriching the topic. At the end of the course, students summarize their curation experience in a form of written report.

The study consists of two stages. At the first stage, we follow the participants’ curation topics in order to understand how their personal identities affect their work. The second stage includes observations of the class discussions regarding the curation activity and analysis of students' believes about the curation process.
The paper provides our preliminary results that allow estimating the curation as a tool with great potential in education.

Keywords:

Social media, digital curation, postindustrial class.