Curating the Web (Reflection #4)

This week was quite the challenge for me, i was introduced to Bookmarking/Clouds and Content Curation - two tools designed to assist you with your academic needs (or knowledge of personal interests). A Cloud is an online 'bookmarking' site that you must make an account for, that way you can customize, save and store important sites to an online database which allows you access to your saved pages anywhere. You can customize your marked page by adding comments or 'sticky notes' to expand on findings. With this ability to customize important information students or researchers are able to refer back to their bookmarked sites and view the comments made on the sites importance. This makes things like citation or quoting on essays much more effective.

Content Curation is an online tool which filters topics of your choosing and presents you with the most up to date content, the tool i chose in particular was Scoop It. It is similar to Diigo because of the ability of adding comments to articles however, it has more social networking aspects such as linking your content curator to your own Twitter or Facebook account. I can definitely see myself using Scoop It as a tool to contribute to my knowledge, especially in regards to my career path. I like that I am able to see professionals comment on certain topics, it expands my point of view allowing me to see a new perspective. Being the 'Philosophy Truth Seeker' that I am, I love learning about other peoples experiences, beliefs, and culture through the ability to communicate with others, Scoop It is excellent for that.

As I was exploring Scoop It I couldn't help but copy links that I had found and moved them over to my Feeder - each week I continue to learn more about the internet and how its constantly evolving. I already had accounts like Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook but being introduced to web tools such as Feedly and Scoop It I feel like I'm on my way to creating a more career-academic digital footprint rather than with just the basic social media sites. I like that with this new digital foot-print that I am leaving will be extremely beneficial to myself as it opens up the gates to networking than the door to connections (extremely beneficial at this point in my life as by this April I need to decide whether or not I will be moving, if I do move I am going to have to start networking from scratch - not always easy, but always fun to do).

So! If you're a student and havent made an account on Diigo or Scoop It -  Check them out when you have time to kill.

PS. Just saw on my Feedly: I dont know about anybody else but i've been dying to put on my skates this winter. On Family Day St. Catharines (Seymour-Hannah) will be having a free skating for the Brock Community. For more info  CLICK HERE!