Curation in Personal and Professional Life

Twitter. Feedly. Diigo. Pinterest. And still more curation tools I haven't tried yet.  Which is the one for me?  Is there just one?  Somehow I think there will be more than one, yet I am wary of the need to monitor and truly need to find ones that will not require me to monitor.  I have a Facebook account but rarely use it, I fear, even though friends and family are frequently on it.  I prefer not to be open to the world; instead I am inclined to personalize my messages, inquire about specifics in folks' lives, tell each what I think s/he will be most interested in about my life. Twitter and Facebook are so public.  Right now I am not seeing how Twitter can help me too much, outside of possibly posting homework assignments.  I like how we had a little time to practice today, yet feel I still need more time to play and tweet, for instance.

In my personal life I can see using curation as a reserve for ideas, essentially.  When working on decisions for our new house my husband and I piled up ideas in Houzz, which is an interesting site.  I certainly like the idea of keeping the curation in the cloud, although if there is no internet I guess I'll just have to stare at the clouds or read a book (hooray!!) I've already started collecting ideas for a trip to Quebec in diigo.  Another tag in diigo will serve to help curate sites for our art trip to NYC. Prior to doing this it has been saved on a google doc, which works.

Pinterest has piqued my curiosity in the past and I welcomed working within the site.  I like how it is set up visually and think I could have students follow certain pages that I have created. In particular, my AP students could follow my AP pages and create their own.  I believe the curation concept would be great to teach to students, yet as with us this week, showing a few tools and letting students pick their own might be the best bet.  If they are more excited about their method of curation they might be more intent to make it work for them.