Content Curation: A Beginner's Journey To Content Curation

If you would have had asked me at the very beginning of this course what "Content Curation" means, let alone "Curation of Health Information" I probably would have given you a peculiar gaze with a shrug of my shoulders and provided a less than inaccurate response like 'its a collection of information on a topic' or something along those lines. Well...I was kinda on the right track. Curation is a collection of information, however this is only the beginning of what it really means and how it actually works.

Content curation is the process of finding and collecting online content and constructing it in a systematic form in order to share with other people who share a common interest. Now, your probably thinking to your self, what is the point of creating a content curation and who would be interested in seeing what I like. Honestly, looking up ideas on how to be more creative in decorating my living or finding an article about Pain management would be little of use to others. Or would it? Instagram, Tiktok and Pinterest are just a few well known social media platform that people use everyday to post, share and connect with others around the world whether we know them or not. People connect when they have a similar interest on various topics which creates a line of open communication to share and to explore. While, I have not utilize social media platforms to share and collect information, I have used content curation to much of a less informal formate by sending an email on a particular journal article to a colleague.

The process of Content Curation with a focus on obtaining health information started by identifying how I conducted my research. Generally, speaking I would simply type the subject into my computer and sift through endless material until I found something that appeared to have credibility. Not an easy task. And with the information I have collected, I kept them open on my computed until I was finished and than deleted to content since I had the reference on a paper I had wrote. Not a well thought out system I had since if I wanted that article again, chances are....it was long gone.

Over the past few weeks, and getting a better understanding of Content Curation, I started to research tools that would work for me in creating a content curation of my own. And the more I looked into it, the more I realized that I have been missing out. These tools area phenomenal and actually easy to navigate and use. For the purpose of this course, I have selected to use Pearltrees and Mendeley as my content curation tools. Mendeley is a great tool I am using to store my article I have found and provides and easy access for retrieval. As for Pearltrees, and at this time I am using to store information to help create my e-Portfolio.

My plane is continue to explore and develop my curation content and expand out to share more with others.