Week 3 Blog - Digital Curation

With the multitude of websites, sources, and other learning platforms, it can be difficult to focus down to the key information that you may need. The internet is an easy place to get lost in especially with the increasing amounts of information that is uploaded on a daily basis. As a result the practice of digital curation is an important skill for modern learners, wether that be for educational purposes or just for regular people in their spare time, like learning a skill or information on a interesting topic. 


Digital curation, through what sources say, is an individual experience and can have a range of emotional, cognitive, and personalised learning experience (Tsybulsky, 2020). This means that each person who tries to digitally curate will have different results depending on how much the topic interest them, leading to higher motivation and greater results with sources that relate to the topic one is researching. 60% of students with a negative experience found it more difficult to collate sources with possible reasons being connected to the topic researched or the format of the information they were collecting. For example, sources of information do not only need to be written works, they can also be video or oral pieces which can make digesting information easier than sifting through a large number of texts. 

Along with the educational purpose of digital curation, it can also be used for more of a personal interest and information can be collated in websites and social media applications. A key example of this would be TikTok's 'For You' page which takes data from video's you watch and what you like and fits it into a page for the users viewership. This is makes it possible to the user to filter what they want to learn or take away from TikTok videos and access digital information in the form of short video's. Youtube, Instagram, Snapchat all have similar models and majority of the platforms having an "i'm interested" button. 


https://www.reddit.com/r/Instagram/comments/1i0r9lm/where_is_the_not_interested_button/#lightbox 

An example of a category of information being digitally curated in one place are apps like Tumblr and Reddit where there are communities for people who have games, hobbies, or other interests to discuss and exchange information. In an article written by Cheng & Frens (2022) they talk about online affinity networks which have a similar concept to digital curation, however instead of searching for information and gathering it together, people online will voice their opinions on something to help another individual. For instance, fan fiction writers have the concept of "throwing ideas at each other" which is essentially feedback exchange where one writer has one idea that is not fully developed so other writers give proposal on story direction in an attempt to make a complete idea. Both the ideas of digital curation and online affinity help people to learn online by getting relevant feedback or ideas that they can take and use in their learning.     


Cheng, R., & Frens, F. (2022). Feedback Exchange and Online Affinity: A Case Study of Online Fanfiction Writers. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 6(CSCW2). 

Tsybulsky, D. (2020). Digital curation for promoting personalized learning: A study of secondary-school science students’ learning experiences. Journal of Research on Technology in Education, 52(3), 429–440


Comments

  1. Ting Ting11 March 2026 at 20:52

    Thank you for your digital curation reflection. I appreciated how you highlighted that the internet has a lot of information and might make it hard for students to find the best sources. Your discussion about digital curation and personalised learning was fascinating. I believe that important topics help students interact more deeply with material, which can improve source selection and organisation.

    Your example of TikTok's “For You” page showing how digital platforms automatically curate content based on users' interests was also helpful. Digital technologies affect how we access and consume information online. My workplace's Microsoft Teams platform supports cooperation and information sharing, which I considered in my reflection. Like your examples, this platform lets users arrange and share digital content for learning and communication.

    You may expand your debate by linking digital curation and identity. Research implies that the digital content we pick, share, and curate online shapes our digital identities in networked environments (Feher, 2021). This shows that digital curating is about arranging knowledge and shaping our online presence as digital learners.

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