Background: Connecting with Digital Natives and engaging them in the process of research continues to be a challenge. Students are extremely comfortable with social media. They are already engaged in the process of personal content curation through Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, or Instagram accounts. They can apply the same process of judgment, filtering, and connection techniques to more academic endeavors like database usage, academic research, and class projects.

Digital Curation is the process of collecting, grouping and sharing digital content. Curation forces students to judge and organize their resources by categorizing information. In terms of Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives, digital curation covers a variety of thinking skills: labeling, naming, listing, organizing, applying, judging, evaluating, analyzing, and synthesizing.

This workshop will showcase the use of Digital Curation for research in a first-year seminar course. The objective of this active learning pedagogy is to enhance student attention by integrating context and purpose in their research process. Curation helps students make relevant connections between different content and organize it into categories and themes.

Popular tools like Scoop.it, Pearltrees, Lessonpaths and Pinterest are used by students to collect and curate information. Curated collections or playlists of information are followed by other students in class who can take advantage of filtering that has been done.

Our workshop will illustrate the methodology of the use of digital curation for research during the course project. The interactive workshop will include hands on experience with digital curation tools. We will share effective teaching tips, assessment and evaluation of the process.