21st Century Learning and Teaching

Buzz used to be an intangible — something you just felt. No longer.

 

===> Look for online "curators." Experts who collect and share "best of" resources on specific subjects are analogous to museum curators who carefully choose which pieces to display. <===

In social media, curators do a good job of keeping track of people's conversations as they occur in online social spaces and quickly channeling that information, in some cases using tools such as Storify to distill conversations.

For example, the World Economic Forum in Davos uses Storify to put together summaries of its events. Canadian financial cooperative Desjardins wanted to learn about new electronic currencies, so it tracked a UK community dedicated to crowdfunding and sought experts in Africa on mobile-payment practices. The company prefers such information-gathering methods to relying on market-research firms.

===> If you can find the right set of curators to follow, you can reduce your reliance on searches of traditional databases and publications. <===