EdTech 543 - Social Network Learning - Criteria to Assess Effective Curation

When I first enrolled in the MET program and explained to my colleagues that it was 100% online, many were skeptical. Most that have gone through a Master's program say that the collaboration is the best part of receiving your degree.

Education has changed so much over the last five to 10 years. I see it in my classrooms everyday. The amount of collaboration I see with students and the different ways in which they collaborate with each other makes me realize that face-to-face education is only one part of learning for the 21st Century student. I have expected my students to collaborate on many assignments and complete from home but I have never actually experienced the process as I did in this assignment. Yes, I have used Google Drive to collaborate with others in the program before but it was more like splitting parts of an assignment - you do your part and I’ll do mine. This was a much different learning experience.

This week’s artifact was to create a checklist of 15 to 20 criteria that will serve as a tool for assessing the quality and value of an education-related curated topic. We decided to modify the concept of the CRAAP test, first presented in 2010 by California State University. The test, which is an acronym meaning "Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy, and Purpose," is designed to determine if a resource is appropriate for a research setting by evaluating the previously presented criteria and asking a series of questions. The group believed that Relevance, Authority, and Purpose fit well with analyzing the process of curation. Additionally, and extra "P" was added to represent the "presentation" of the information.

I worked within a Personal Learning Network to create this list. The group was fabulous. First, two of the group members had commitments on the weekend (me included) so we needed to complete the assignment early. All members worked diligently on the project and finished before the weekend. For this I say thank you. Second, everyone put in ample work and contributed to the final draft of the list.

As in any discussion - whether face-to-face or online - there were questions to be answered. The original idea of using the CRAAP model sounded great to start but then seemed to hamstring our thoughts and frustrate some of the members. With constant give and take discussion, all issues were resolved professionally. The collaboration included Google Doc chats, Facebook posts and the writing and editing of the list and references on the shared document itself. In the end, I think everyone was happy with the result. We will now move on and use our list in evaluating our own curated topic.

Reference

Evaluating information: Applying the CRAAP test. (2010, September 17). Retrieved from http://www.csuchico.edu/lins/handouts/eval_websites.pdf