Over the last few weeks some of the bigger technology companies, including Apple and Twitter, have made announcements about their planned use of content #curation. L&D take note.
Twitter has been experimenting with services to help serve up curated tweets and Apple has announced that its forthcoming ios 9 News app will be powered in part by algorithm and in part by human editors in order to serve up a curated news experience. These announcements follow on from LinkedIn’s announcement that it has been testing a new curation tool for users called Elevate.
I’ve included a list of these updates below but in short these developments show that content curation is a big trend. Technology companies are developing tools that enable users to suck in content from the web and then share it back out. There are a myriad of tools that enable users to do this currently but you are likely to be quite technically proficient, or interested in tools, to be using them (think of the 50% of late adopters and laggards in technology adoption). No, these latest developments show advances in web filtering through sophisticated semantic search engines and algorithms and simple user interfaces that will make content curation so much easier for us all.
This provides opportunities for L&D professionals and for learning provision within organisations. Curation helps individuals usefully filter the web, to seek out relevant content on topics of interest, to add context and then to share that contexutalised content to relevant audiences – your team, peers, functions within the business and so on.
If anyone can do this, then information flows around employees could become very powerful. As these tools get easier to use so more people will adopt them. And it is this large scale adoption that L&D teams need to be thinking about. What are people curating and sharing? How useful is it to the organisation? How can the organisation harness it? These are all valid questions right now which is why it is worth keeping an eye on how the curation space is hotting up.
