If I were a venture capitalist, I’d invest in applications and companies that attack the problem of curating content.
Content used to be king. The best content attracted attention, consumption and dollars. The quality of your content determined your success.
But today, our brains are in a state of constant cognitive overload. I used to struggle to create my content network, whether I was writing a paper in school or looking for news. Now I’m overloaded with blogs, news sites, social networks and all kinds of email. My RSS reader and inbox taunt me with unprocessed information.
Likewise, now that content creation and delivery systems like Blogger, Flickr or WordPress are free, diverse and accessible, content creators find their videos, photos, writing and ideas lost in the content sea.
The struggle to curate pervades our personal and professional lives. In our personal lives, we can’t effectively prioritize the information we need for recreation, play and enjoyment. As learning and development professionals, we have to sort through all of the content that might be worth passing on to our colleagues. And ultimately, we have to support our colleagues in curating their own personal learning environments.
How do we sort it out?
And how do we enable our colleagues to sort it out? If it were up to Mark Zuckerberg, we’d use our social networks to identify the videos, news stories and websites we want to spend our time on. If you ask Google, they would probably argue that better search algorithms – ones that get to know your preferences – will edit the Internet for you. If you ask Diigo, social bookmarking is the future.
As learning leaders in enterprise environments, we must push for the tools that strengthen our learners’ ability to curate their learning environment. On my wish list for those tools:
- Learning platforms that enable users to tag content with keywords for easy, granular search.
- Learning platforms that enable users to “like” or “recommend” specific pieces of content, perhaps sorted by type of colleague or learner who would benefit from it.
- Quora or Yammer-type apps organized by profession or industry type, rather than by company. These could be supported by professional associations and connected to continuing education processes.
OpenSesame Has Your Tools for Curating eLearning Content
OpenSesame is doing its part to solve the curating challenge by making it easy for you to find elearning content and make informed purchasing decisions through granular search of features and characteristics, customer reviews and informative buyer profiles. OpenSesame enables you to search for courses with specific learning objectives, interactive features or seat time, or any combination of of features you need. Furthermore, you can use the author profiles, customer reviews and course previews to quickly focus on the courses that meet your learning and development requirements.
OpenSesame gives you the tools to select the elearning content you need.
Photo Credit: Paul Lowry on Flickr