For the past couple of months I have been weighing up various options on how to best provide students with digital information that they can use to learn more, use for research or apply to their businesses. Students attend either 1-day or 2-day classes through Marketing Tom Media and others attend an MSc Digital Media course that I deliver at Cardiff University Business School. I have used, and still use, blogs to write articles, post videos and display presentations. But what I really wanted to do was to offer up snippets of information – be it text, video, podcast, Scribd, google Docs, quotes, links, photos and more – from around the web that I have picked up and which I think might be of interest to students. I looked at Google Plus, Facebook, WordPress and Twitter and dismissed each: due to style, format, expected level of engagement, and other factors.
I decided that I was getting a little bored with the chronological, vertical, same-old style of blogs and wanted a storyboard mixed with different media which would visually attractive and would mean that I didn’t have to go searching for appropriate images and permissions. I liked what Pinterest was doing with images but I wanted other media mixed in: Vimeo, YouTube, Instagram, tweets, images, infographics, text, Slideshare, Soundcloud clips, podcasts and many other social media plug-ins.
And whilst doing some research on micro-blogging platforms for one of my courses, I stumbled upon some Tumblr templates and found one in particular, from a company called Style Hatch, which I felt would suit my needs perfectly. The Inspire Well theme is a grid-based layout which displays content in a clean, attractive format and “offers 40+ options in the Appearance menu including support Disqus, Google Analytics, Clicky, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and more.” Perfect!
But the interesting thing is that I am adding relevant content for my students, on to a nice-looking page and without having to spend too much time thinking of what to publish. In fact, I don’t think about what to create beforehand. I see, I like and I publish (after considering the interests of my target audience). What I am actually doing is curating information from around the web and using folksonomy (tagging) to archive articles. We are seeing an increase in use of content curation on sites like Pinterest (images), Evernote (bookmarked articles) and Storify (news stories and tweets) across the web. It could be said that the bloggers of yesterday are making way for the curators of today. But not to worry there is still a huge amount of content out there – and of a pretty high quality.
Related Links
Alun John Tumblr account
I’d love to hear what you think of this approach.
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