Peer Motivation Through Content Curation

Prior to Semester

1. Decide on the most appropriate social curation tool for the student cohort

1. Google Slides (formerly known as Presentations). The benefit is that Google Slides is accessible for all RMIT students. The slide deck can be shared privately via a link or an embed code, and does not need to be shared on a public platform. You can organise the activity by setting up a template or limiting the number of slides you want students to use

2. Scoop.It (www.scoop.it) is a popular curation platform that lets users create magazines of curated content and immediately share a link via Twitter, Facebook or other platforms. Scoop.It benefits from having a large crowd of dedicated human curators who maintain highly specialised topics. A nice feature is its added functionality of serving information to the user based on their topics and previous curation. You can subscribe to this as a news streams and it can be a powerful information discovery tool. Scoop.It is accessible via the browser and has a browser add-on. It also offers an app but this isn’t very user-friendly.

3. Pinterest (www.pinterest.com) is a curation platform that is suited to visual content. It lets users collect artefacts like websites, videos, graphics or other media content but represents by showing them as one image—known as a pin. Collections are known as pinboards. In learning situations, Pinterest is highly suited to working with visual content, such as business diagrams or models. It is one of the few curation platforms which will not charge for collaboration functionality, so it is suitable for group or project team work. Pinterest is accessible via a browser and has its own apps. It has a browser add-on for easier pinning.

4. Storify (www.storify.com) is a curation tool that in its own words “helps users tell stories by curating social media”. It lets a user set up a “story” into which they can drag and drop or add information from anywhere on the web as well as facilitating direct search access to social media outlets like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Helpfully, and different from other curation tools, Storify lets users provide context to their collection story by allowing the insertion of text and headings around different parts of the story. Storify’s ability to do this has made it a popular tool for journalists. Storify is accessible via the browser and has a browser add-on for easier collection of artefacts. It also has a very good tablet app. You can create a dynamic list of relevant news items for your course.

Class Activity

2. Google Slides

1. Assign students the task to create a slide deck. This slide deck can be themed along the content of your course, for example “Top 10 Business Tools Created Since 2000” or it can be about study support for example “3 Ways To Organise Your Notes” or “3 best places to study in SAB building”. Students can share the presentations online in Blackboard forums, in a Google community you set up or as part of a tutorial

3. Scoop.It

1. Ask students to set up a Scoop.It board on a company, person of interest or aspect of business and begin collecting information

2. After 6 weeks ask them to demonstrate their board and their curation strategy and present their top 5 artefacts in a tutorial session or in an online reflection. Ask them to set their own criteria for quality of artefacts and to reflect on their own curation practice

4. Pinterest

1. Ask students to set up a Pinterest board on business models suitable to a particular business goal

2. By the end of course, ask students to use their top three pins in an essay, describe how they might employ one of these three models and include a link to the board in their references

3. Throughout the course, encourage students to connect with each other’s Pinterest boards and to share pins via the course communication tools

4. For a group assessment, ask students to maintain a Pinterest board of resources for their assessment, such as diagrams, videos or websites. The group can leave comments on each artefact that describes how it ties with their project

5. Storify

1. Ask students to curate a business news story of interest to them in Storify at the beginning of the course to be completed within a set time

2. Once they’ve set up the Storify; ask the students to share the link with their tutorial group or with smaller peer groups for feedback

3. In class, create a rubric to share the criteria for the digital story assignment and perhaps develop a Storify exemplar.