While the world’s education system has not yet fully adapted to digital technology, there are many resources that can be accessed without attending school. The internet itself offers an immense amount of information and learning could easily happen outside normal classroom hours if one were so inclined – but having teachers would definitely help guide newcomers through this unfamiliar territory.
For example, it is useless to put a child who knows nothing in the library and expect them to learn on their own. Because an inexperienced person does not know where to start or what to read. You will have to spend a lot of time learning on your own. Therefore, it is best to learn from those who have experience. Science and education are perfected by inheritance.
The Internet was created to make our lives easier, but sometimes it can be difficult for us to just figure out what we should do with all this information available on the web. For example, when someone wants to learn coding Coursera shows more than 100 courses – you don’t know where or how to start! Google actually came up with the idea of presenting information on the Internet in a clear way. So people like myself will find what we are looking for through endless web pages…but wait there’s even MORE bad news: if I try searching anything under google (like say “coding”) I am shown endless results, and not all of them are relevant to me – some are irrelevant duplicates, many are potentially valuable but I’m not sure which ones.
Curation
It’s not enough that you have all the necessary books in a library, but they must be cataloged in a certain way so people can find them easily. That’s what Google does. However, it is still not enough to learn. We need a structured introduction to these books. Similarly, everyone who has a computer with internet access has free access to all the online information. But, we also need online curators who will guide us through this endless information.
That is, just as there are teachers and schools that teach the information in the books in one plan, so do the people who present and guide the information on the Internet with a certain system. For example, someone on this page has prepared the online resources needed to study computer science according to a specific plan: https://github.com/ForrestKnight/open-source-cs
Having information is just half the battle because a certain base level of intelligence is also required to be able to assimilate that information into useful knowledge. Therefore we need online curators as much as we need creators. Curators present information in a structured way.
So let’s say you want to learn Python programming – you know nothing about it and need guidance, but don’t know where or how to start. This page will tell you what to read first, second, and so on. It is written by someone who has experience in the field of computer science and knows how to learn something about coding!
A curator might be considered an expert because he or she has already mastered the subject enough to know where all its points are located. They understand the structure of what they study, so they know how to divide it into smaller parts and find their way around it. As you can see, curators are people who organize information – they maintain order in a chaotic world of information!
Social curation
Curation is a social process that involves many members of a community or crowd in determining the value of items and so establishing what has value. Examples of social curation are evident in online peer production, crowdsourcing, and citizen science projects.
Community members can collaborate to help manage curation within common workspaces, such as Wikipedia. In the context of Wikipedia, many editors collaborate to create articles. They do not necessarily agree on what is an article or what articles should contain; instead, they rely upon social integration and interaction between group members for information quality control. This process does not guarantee that Wikipedia will be error-free (indeed, it may encourage errors), but it does increase the extent to which errors are corrected and up-to-date information is included.
The term “crowdsourcing” is often used to describe the use of volunteer contributors who do not necessarily know each other or work together but still share a common goal. An example of crowdsourced curation for science was performed by users on Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT). AMT is a crowdsourcing Internet marketplace that enables individuals and businesses to coordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks that computers are currently unable or inefficient at doing.
Curation is also important in citizen science projects, which involve many members of the public in collecting data or making observations rather than professional scientists. Members of the public are often interested in contributing to scientific knowledge, and citizen science projects provide an opportunity for them to do so. (See NASA’s citizen science projects.)
The articles that result from the contributions of a community or crowdsourcing process are not necessarily error-free or well-written, but they often include information that is up to date and comprehensive in comparison with any other available resources. This kind of curation can be performed by individuals and communities to determine the value of information.
I’d also suggest reading this post about community-based knowledge platforms.