Senior Research Associate at Lancaster University has written an article that will resonate with many teachers. It explores the need for contemporary skills, digital literacy skills and effective ways to assess them.
He writes under a subheading : Digital content curators
In my recent research looking at the ways students write their assignments, I found that increasingly they may not always compose written work which is truly “authentic”, and that this may not be as important as we think. Instead, through prolific use of the internet, students engaged in a number of sophisticated practices to search, sift, critically evaluate, anthologise and re-present pre-existing content. Through a close examination of the moment-by-moment work of the way students write assignments, I came to see how all the pieces of text students produced contained elements of something else. These practices need to be better understood and then incorporated into new forms of education and assessment.
These online practices are about harnessing an abundance of information from a multitude of sources, including search engines like Google, in what I call a form of “digital content curation”. Curation in this sense is about how learners use existing content to produce new content through engaging in problem-solving and intellectual inquiry, and creating a new experience for readers. Find the full article