Curation, curation, curation

Abstract

The media curation craze has spawned a multitude of new sites that help users to collect and share web content. Some market themselves as spaces to explore a common interest through different types of related media. Others are promoted as a means for creating and sharing stories, or producing personalized newspapers. Still others target the education market, claiming that curation can be a powerful learning tool for web-based content. But who really benefits from the curation task: the content curator or the content consumer? This paper will argue that for curation to fully support learning, on either side, then the curation site has to allow the content curator to research and tell stories through their selected content and for the consumer to rewrite the story for themselves. This brings the curation task inline with museum practice, where museum professionals tell stories through careful selection, organization and presentation of objects in an exhibition, backed up by research. This paper introduces the notion of 'recuration' to describe a process in which shared content can be used as part of learning.