One thing that is noticeable about web 2.0 is the amount of information sharing that goes on. Those of us who hail from "The Pepsi Generation" have gone from finding a couple of pertinent articles in a Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature and praying the library carried the journals to an onslaught of information available through online databases and internet search engines.
"With the overwhelming amount of content available on the Internet today, it is difficult for professionals to efficiently manage their daily reading activities, as well as separate useful and accurate content from poor content. This is where content curation comes in, allowing individuals or businesses to provide a valuable service to their audiences by addressing their need for quality content and the lack of available time to find it.
Pete Cashmore, CEO of Mashable, believes that content curation is one of the top 10 Web trends for 2010"
Barksdale, Christy. "Content Curation: Bringing Order to Information Overload." PR 20/20 Blog, 8 Apr 2010 . Online. 8 Oct 2011.
As you can see from the above quote, organizing, managing, and making sense all this information has become very important. Most of us are not working at the level of a professional curator who works to aggregate information for a whole business or educational department, but if you are a teacher or a teacher-librarian, you will find yourself in the position of finding, gathering, and sharing pertinent information with colleagues in your personal learning networks or data teams and with your students who are doing research. Not only must you start doing this yourself, but you have an obligation to teach your students how this is done in order to enable them to operate adequately in this information rich world.
We are going to begin our foray into information curation with a web 2.0 tool called diigo. It is an online bookmarking tool that besides bookmarking websites, allows you to capture screens that have a way of disappearing, highlighting your reading, and tagging the any information you have gathered so you and those you share with can easily search for it later. It also allows you to join groups that gather information you are interested in so that you can collaborate in finding and curating information.