Over the last five weeks, we have worked relatively independently on our blogs while simultaneously remaining in contact with members of our cohort by contributing to our Google+ community and Twitter. The amount of information inside of blogs, posts, tweets and videos at times has been overwhelming and I often struggled to keep up with the volume. There were many valuable learning experiences along the way and numerous ‘aha’ moments have come from the resources posted by my peers. As the ‘fire hose’ of information kept pouring forth, I realized that I needed a tool to deal with too much information. I decided it was time to look into using a curation tool that would help and sort resources. This topic first appeared as one of our choices inside of Week 4’s assignments and was first explored by Fenella Olynick in her blog Too Much Creation and Not Enough Curation. For this week’s task, I decided to use Pintrest as a social curating tool to collect and organize materials that I have used in OLTD 505. Pintrest is a tool that I have not used before but have always wanted to try and it seemed like a natural fit for this assignment.
I’ve organized my blog into weekly topics. I’ve provided a brief summary of the materials investigated. Each week title is then linked to a board created in Pintrest. Feel free to take a look at the resources and repin them for your own use. I have also invited as many of the members of our cohort access to the boards by using the invite feature on Twitter. Visitors can contribute or redistribute the materials as needed. Any feedback would be appreciated.
Weeks in Review
I’ve organized my blog into weekly topics. I’ve provided a brief summary of the materials investigated. Each week title is then linked to a board created in Pintrest. Feel free to take a look at the resources and repin them for your own use. I have also invited as many of the members of our cohort access to the boards by using the invite feature on Twitter. Visitors can contribute or redistribute the materials as needed. Any feedback would be appreciated.
Weeks in Review
Week 1
- Introduction to Open Educational Resources (OER)-What are they? Why are they important? What does open mean?
- The four R’s (reuse, remix, redistribute and revise)
- The importance of sharing information to allow access to education to everyone regardless of location and economic status
Week 2
- Copyright/copy left (What is the difference? Why are they needed? Where did these concepts originate from?)
- Creative commons (What is it? Who can contribute?)
- Aaron Swartz (Who was he? What his contribution to access of information on the internet? How did his contribution change the openness of information on the internet?
Week 3
- Review of OER’s
- Critique of the Open University from the UK
- Using rubrics to assess the different criteria of OER’s
Week 4
- Sharing- the moral imperative (Dean Shareski)
- Everyone has something to share- value what you create
- Curating information and dealing with resources as they enter
Click to set custom Follow Kym Toporowski's board Week 4: Sharing on Pinterest.
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Week 5
- Revisiting useful websites, blogs, posts and tweets from members of the cohort
- Social curation (What is it? How to use it? Using Pintrest as a social curation tool)
Click to set Follow Kym Toporowski's board Week 5 Reflections and Social Curation on Pinterest.
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As a social curating tool, Pintrest is easy to use; even for the first time user. Once you have downloaded the pinning extension to your browser, collecting websites, videos or blogs is as simple as clicking a button. The boards themselves are easy to create and manage. The only aspect that I would change when creating future boards would be to include more detailed description when creating new pins. It wasn’t until I did a little further investigation and readings that I noticed that repined material usually came with a long description written by experienced users of Pintrest, whereas my new ones lacked hashtags and other important curating details. Overall, Pintrest is a useful tool to create visual folders of resources that can then be easily accessed at a later day. There is also a collaborative process within Pintrest that allows the materials to be shared with others so that they can reuse and redistribute as needed. This is my first attempt at using a social curating tool and I would repeat this process in future classes in order to proactively deal with the amount of resources.