Scoop and Share - Exploring the use of Digital Curation in the ESL classroom

The aim of this study is to explore the potentials of digital curation in an educational context. I wish to illuminate how this approach can promote digital literacies for the 21st century, and furthermore how students understand and experience being digital curators, developing Personal Learning Networks, and reading and writing online. To find answers, a research project was conducted among ESL learners in an upper secondary school in Sør-Trøndelag. During this project, 22 students used the digital curation tool Scoop.it to find resources and to learn about the topic multiculturalism over a period of four weeks. This study can therefore be characterized as digital literacy research, as it explores how people act, learn, communicate and distribute knowledge while using digital technology. To do this, observations, a digital survey, interviews and collecting authentic student texts were used as methodological approaches for collecting data. The study has found that digital curation can be a valuable approach to promote skills such as searching, evaluating, commenting, sharing, reading and writing. These skills are closely connected to collaboration, comprehension and critical thinking, which are significant literacies for today’s digital learners. Most of the students in this project experienced digital curation as useful for gathering digital resources, and they valued being able to choose texts to read from a variety of web pages. Furthermore, writing insight-comments in accompany with the collected resources, appeared to make the students more critical regarding what sources they chose to curate. The study also found that the various acts of digital curation take place at different taxonomic levels, which means that this connectivist learning approach can find support in Blooms’ Revised Taxonomy for cognitive processes. However, the students only got a taste of developing their own Personal Learning Networks, which means that there are a great deal of potential linked to digital curation waiting to be explored. Consequently, I believe digital curation can provide a valuable contribution to schools aiming to have an active, yet critically conscious relationship to new technologies, and to teachers who recognize the potentials found in the encounters between traditional teaching and a digital culture for knowledge