Online Curation & Social Annotation @ Vanier

Online curation is increasingly recognized as a necessary life-long skill for managing information overload.

It consists of purposefully collecting online content, selecting and organizing it, summarizing each piece while explaining its importance for the collection as a whole, and sharing the curated pieces, all on a cloud-based platform.

Such platforms provide collaborative learning opportunities: students can curate in teams or offer feedback on their peer’s source choices.

Curation also promotes autonomy as students take ownership of their research and its dissemination.

To curate well students must know how to consume media critically. Social annotation helps them learn to do so. Cloud-based- social annotation platforms allow students to comment on elements of a discourse (video, image, or text) and each other’s comments.

Together, students collaborate to understand or deepen their understanding of a discourse.

Today, students require not simply information literacy but metaliteracy—a 21st century, comprehensive framework that encompasses multiple literacies and the active consumption, creation, and sharing of content in participatory, digital environments. It values ethical, socially responsible online behaviour, and promotes critical thinking, metacognition, collaboration, and peer-learning.

As part of their work, the OCSA team seeks to teach metaliteracy through the use of online curation and social annotation activities, as well as other online collaborative work.

Touted as an essential 21st century skill, collaboration affords the opportunity to learn from others. When students collaborate together, they organically help each other learn.

Teachers can structure activities to optimize that learning process. Because peer-learning is not only central to social annotation, but can be valuable with online curation, the OCSA team has developed tools to help teachers promote peer-learning in these contexts.