Blog #400

graphic from Wikimedia Commons

Today's blog post marks number 400 at the Drive-thru, so I'll indulge myself in reflecting on what my blog means to me these days.

From the beginning, the Drive-thru has served as a way for me to work out my thoughts on various instructional technology topics.  When I started, it was fun for this English major to simply start writing in an authentic way.  While I've lost the "kick" I get from writing,  the discipline definitely helps me sort out my experiences and notions.

The focus has shifted somewhat from classroom practice, to professional development, to curation.  I enjoy the way that the blog itself causes me to read more.  Sometimes during lunch I'll sift through my RSS feeds looking for quotes or links.  Beside serving the blog, I also come across many interesting subjects and articles that I don't pass along.

At first when I started to post I was disappointed that I was not achieving more discussion with my posts.  But then I started to notice a curious tendency: I tended to achieve more back and forth when something had ticked me off or I had taken a more provocative position.  So I rarely even think about it anymore.  Google supplies me with stats on my number of readers.  I'm happy to know that I have an audience even if I am not artificially ginning up controversy. (We have enough of that in the media, don't we?).

And lastly I confess a guilty pleasure:  I still love looking for photos on the Creative Commons.  While today's effort is not perhaps my best, as with all the others, it suits the the theme in some obvious or obscure way.  And I have not violated copyright.

Thanks for stopping at the Drive-thru.

The Teacher as Curator

When I am feeling a little morbid, I sometimes check in on Newspaper Death Watch. A post on the evolving role of newspapers as online content curators grabbed my attention:

Content curation is about filtering the stuff that people really need from out of all the noise around it. In the same way that museum curators choose which items from a collection to put on display, content curators select and publish information that’s of interest to a particular audience. This function is becoming more and more critical as the volume of information on the Internet explodes. It’s projected that the amount of digital information that will be created in 2010 could fill 75 billion 16 GB Apple iPads.

"Curating" was a word that was banded about quite a bit at our 2010 ADE Summer Institute. In fact my project group has continued to "curate" Challenge Based Learning materials right up to the present. This is for good reason. We're all daunted by the amount of information out there regarding technology and education. Consequently my project team is pretty much bent on the task of identifying valuable resources for teachers interested in Challenge Based Learning. This really motivates me because I think we will be providing a potentially valuable, (and free) service.

I also think it is useful for teachers to think of themselves as curators. Personally, I enjoy this role, because I am interested in a range of subjects and I suppose I have some knowledge about a lot of things. I'm helpful with information searches and I am familiar with a range of resources.

I am interested in sharing this point of view with media specialists when I present at MAME 37, in October.  I'm guessing that I will be preaching to the choir.  Do you agree?

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"Overload Information" Flickr Creative Commons photo by Maty