Week 4 - Reflection #4 Curating Content

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What did you learn/notice in your exploration of bookmarking tools and the use of tagging? How will these tools be useful in your educational activities?

I learned that Feedly makes bookmarking and finding sources to bookmark much easier than using the Google search engine. Although, sometimes, when I want something more out of my Feedly, I explore through Google, it all ends up back at my Feedly anyway. The use of tagging, I think, is one of the greatest inventions that Web 2.0 could have provided. No longer do we have to search through millions of digital catalogs of information, but rather type in a key word (tag) and find millions of results instantly.

These tools can be extremely helpful in educational activities because often tags and bookmarking is critical when leafing through thousands of online articles and scholarly reviews. I think it makes scavenging the internet so much easier and finding a reliable resource is easier than many people make it seem to be.

What do valid and reliable online bookmarks contribute to your work in building knowledge?

Valid and reliable online bookmarks help develop links to educational websites and information that is pertinent to current events and technology. They help with being organized and sifting through mountains of information that, through tags, are pertinent to what you're searching for. I find that building knowledge is more easily accomplished when information is in an organized state.

What are the uses of a curation tool? How do you envision using the tool to contribute to your work in building knowledge?

A curation tool is used to aide subscribers in finding ways to create meaningful websites and blogs by compiling content from various aspects on the internet into one area. One that the vast majority of people would know is Pinterest. Pinterest is a curation tools that gathers blogs and pictures and gathers them together where users can "repin" what they like onto specific "boards". Boards are specialized places that a user owns to divide their interests into specific likes. Example of boards are "food", "dresses", etc.

The tool that I would like to try is Pluggio. Meg Sutton summarizes Pluggio as "a secure, web-based system to help individuals, businesses, organizations and marketers easily grow and manage their social media profiles." I believe this is essential because social media is essential to modern day business practices and I believe that it is crucial to manage one's presence online and to understand others through their activities online.

What type of tools are these? How would you categorize these tools as part of your PLE? Can you categorize them according to the PLE diagram you set up in Week2?

Curation tools are aggregate tools because they amalgamate several different bits from the internet and combine them into the same general location. 

What are you learning about becoming a digital citizen or gaining digital literacy?

I am learning that there are more ways to be involved in becoming a digital citizen rather than just creating information. I've always been a curator online because I've been reposting, reblogging, sharing, forwarding, and liking on many different social media sites. Becoming a digital citizen doesn't mean one has to be the most creative, or the most knowledgeable about the internet and technology, but rather finding ways to recreate, organize and manage the information overload that is the online environment.