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Editor's Notes

• #2: My name is Ben Betts and I’m here today to foretell the death of learning content… or something like that. Which brings me to my first question, before I’ve even really begun; is content still king?
• #3: If you have a device online do go to the URL, tinyurl.com/elnpoll and answer the one question – This house believes CONTENT is still king. Answer with an Aye! If you concur with the statement or a No! if you disagree. For shits and giggles let’s do it in the room now. If you believe the statement to be true, give me an Aye! Otherwise give me a no! All those for the statement, this house believes CONTENT is still king, say aye! And the No’s? OK, maybe we’ll need the online poll to be slightly more scientific. First two people to show me their phones having voted get a free book, how about that?! OK, so let me pick on someone, for the Aye’s, why do you think the statement is still true? Has it always been true? OK, someone for the No’s. Was the statement ever true? Has it changed? OK, let’s move on, we might revisit this a little later to see if we’ve changed any minds…
• #4: For me, when I’m talking about Curation, I’m talking about the aggregation and synthesis of digital resources, by a real person, with a specific purpose. So it’s more than collecting; you also need to distill and get rid of content. And, for me, it takes a real person to be a digital curator, not a tool, because of this final point, that there is a specific purpose in mind. A curator has a bias and makes no apologies for it. They gather resources to fit and prove the narrative they are trying to push. You see it in the news media, very prominently right now.
• #5: My journey to think about curation and learning was triggered by a visit to the NHM, london, a number of years ago. By transforming these very different objects into a compelling story, curators engage the audience in a journey that helps them to make sense of the individual pieces in a wider context. Individually the objects tell a minor part of the puzzle. Collectively, they are worth more than the sum of their parts. What’s more, different curators can re-use the same objects in different ways. By bringing a particular lens of expertise and experience, each curator can weave a different story from the same content.
• #6: But can we spot digital curation when we see it? Here’s a few examples, shout out if you think these are examples of digital curation… First, paper.li. Ever see this? This tool will create a digital newspaper, personally tailored for you, each day, based out of your social media activity and that of the people you follow. There’s a number of tools like it. Scoop.it. Is this digital curation? I tend to think not, I think its more aggregation. The algorithm doesn’t give you much of a choice of what ends up in the newspaper, it just picks it for you. And there’s no real opportunity to transform or re-contextualise the resources, they are just presented ‘as is’.
• #7: My dad calls this Pin Interest. I’ve told him a number of times. He now just does it to piss me off. Which works. There’s more of a personal narrative here, less algorithm involved. You can’t do much transformation though.
• #8: This probably is. Sad as it may seem, someone has aggregated, synthesised and transformed to fit with a personal narrative. It just happens to be that the narrative is animals dressed as thor… Say what you want about Buzzfeeds brand of news journalism, but they are fast!
• #9: I guess what it comes down to, for me, is that we are rich in content. It used to be that online learning was weird. When I did my degree online in 2006, most of my friends assumed it was fake. But as the internet has grown, it has transformed industries. It used to be that people wouldn’t buy big ticket items online – like a holiday. Then lastminute.com came along and started changing all that; they became an aggregator. Perhaps even a curator of holidays – they liked cheap, last minute deals. And that trend of aggregation has continued. First they say it can’t be done online. Then someone does it online. Then everyone does it online. And then you need aggregators. I keep seeing adverts for Trivago. Pisses me off. An aggregator of aggregators. But the same is true of online content. At first businesses didn’t want external content; they wanted to own it and to brand it, to make it their thing. Now businesses tend to be easier going – they see the value in external content. But now there is so much of it, we have to aggregate.
• #10: Of course, curators go further. I visualise this sort of filter, with the world of rich content going in at the top and only the very best stuff coming out the bottom.
• #11: That transformation process is important and plays into themes we see in learning content today, like smaller pieces of curatable content. It’s hard to curate a course – it’s too big. But you can curate a video, or an interaction. Without the ability to take more than one digitial resource and blend it with another, you are not really curating, just collecting. When I think about collecting I think about star wars nerds; the goal here is to keep things in pristine condition, as it was. But curators are different, they want to tear things apart to put it back together with other things that they make connections with.
• #12: The French have a word for it – Bricolage. It’s actually an art form in this sense, taking pieces from many different things to transform them into something new. I think curation in these terms is really important because our day jobs are increasingly digital bricolage. My day job is less about knowing stuff, more about my ability to see the connections between stuff. Every day, for some stupid reason or another, I end up solving a problem that has probably never existed before. Our lives are so complex and our businesses even more so. It is in your ability to make connections between people and things that your job happens.
• #13: Days like today are wonderful, but I actually think you need to spend some time outside of our industry to make real breakthroughs. The ELN will give you a support network and a community in which to try new things, but it’s the world outside learning that you’ll get most insight from. The connections you make this summer, when reading a book on a beach or whatever it is you do, these are the things that fire your imagination and get you thinking ‘I could apply that to training….’ The connections seem obvious to you; like they must be obvious to everyone. But it is the sum of your experiences that makes the connections possible. It’s what makes you and your connections unique.
• #14: And so our jobs change. It becomes less about making content that fits every learning need, and more about enabling sparks, connections between content and people. That means there is less emphasis on creating perfect content – there’s no such thing. But you can curate relevant content to act as the baseline. These guys should know, one of the biggest adopters of a curation strategy for learning and working is the CIA.
• #15: We are still fairly obsessed with making content. It is often a major blocker for us. But I’m saying, this isn’t where learning happens. It’s in the spaces between content and resources that learning occurs. You cannot make enough content, fast enough, to be really relevant to all the jobs people do and all the problems they have. Rapid elearning isn’t going to cut it anymore, you’ve got to change tactic.
• #16: Enter curation. That’s when you make connections for yourself and actually learn something. Your job is about creating the spark and letting people figure out problems for themselves…
• #17: Seek out content; transform it into a new context or give it a new spin and then share it with other people. That’s how you curate.
• #18: So, taking a breathe on my very high pedestal of dismissing learning content as tosh, how can you actually use curation techniques as part of the learning and development strategy? Three areas where I focus are called Inspiration, Instruction and Implementation.
• #19: I think we can curate content to help inspire our people. This might mean putting up some new content weekly on a social network, or sending out an email. Heck, on my out of office I tend to put a link to a good video that I think will start people thinking about something new and different. TED talks are an obvious example – they used to have this little star next to their tag line, Ideas Worth Spreading. If you followed the star it led to another tag line of ‘or at least ideas worth arguing about’. That, for me, is what inspiration is all about. Triggering conversations and connections.
• #20: My next I is for instruction – how can you curate resources as a means of teaching a formal course or curriculum. Forgive me, but this one is a bit of a specialist subject as we made a piece of software called Curatr to do exactly this. Let me show you how that works…
• #26: We’re not the only ones doing things like this these days; the next generation of learning tools are doing somehting similar. Brightwave’s Tessello, Fuse, NetEx Learning play – all based on similar principles.
• #27: Finally, we come to implementation. This is where you get learners doing the curation for you; you task other people with curating what works. So that could be as a result of going on a training course – that they have to then go back and curate resources or perform some sort of action or group based learning project. It could be that you get people to document their takeaways. It could be that you use social media type tools inside the organisation and allocate roles to people as curators. Or that you try to build a community of practice to get people curating on a particular subject area. Either way, you want evidence of what works for people in your organisation, as they curate it from other resources and places.
• #28: You can of course mix and match these techniques to take people on a learning journey. If you want people to change you are going to need to inspire, instruct and help implement change. So, when I think about a new learning campaign, I draw up a playbook – with the three I’s on one side and a continuum between ‘directed’ learning activities and ‘self-directed learning activities’
• #29: Into that playbook I start putting in the tools and sources that I have at my disposal. I think quite techie, so I go to tech tools quickly, but you might not.
• #30: Into that playbook I start putting in the tools and sources that I have at my disposal. I think quite techie, so I go to tech tools quickly, but you might not.
• #31: Into that playbook I start putting in the tools and sources that I have at my disposal. I think quite techie, so I go to tech tools quickly, but you might not.
• #32: 2x2 matrix to put it into context….
• #33: Has anyone changed their mind?
• #34: Eureka moments are incredibly rare. Usually, you have to work at it.