Faculty as Curators

Joseph Rueter gave a great conceptual overview of curation at today's MinneBar -- one that had no overt push for his company CurationStation.com. Instead, it was a great look at the role of curation in society (I have no hope of summarizing the deck and presentation here; trust me, it was good) and it got me thinking about the role of faculty.

Some get worried in the face of MIT's OpenCourseware and such -- "if the content is freely available, what good am I?". But someone needs to steer/guide students rather than dumping information on them (or letting them dump it on themselves). That's the role of a curator!

Nothing magical about the name and role has been around forever but, just as "podcasting" gave rise to distributed on-demand audio content merely because people had a concise name to attach to the concept, "curation" as a term can have an empowering role in the conversation.

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