I am experimenting in other ways with the frenetic standstill that many blog posts represent.  In this case I am indebted to Alton Hynes’s #CLMOOC Paper.li .  Paper.li is a bot.  It asks for inputs (twitter, twitter lists, and more customized links) that it turns into a Newsletter/Newspaper.  You have to play about with it until it makes nice the way you want it to, then you turn it loose onto the sociosphere.

And below is my screencast where I show how a curation grew in sort of real-time. I say “sort of” because the timeline only captures activity. When I stopped, so did it. Here is the workflow if anyone is interested:

1. Went to Aldon Hynes’ Paper.li page,
2. Used LinkGrabber Chrome Extension to scrape all the links from the page,
3. Dropped the relevant links into the TitanPad etherpad,
4. Deleted links that were not content (i.e. navigational, social networking, etc.),
5. Annotated remaining links on TitanPad,
6. Accessed the TitanPad timeline and replayed the curation,
7. Opened Screencast-o-Matic and recorded the timeline from start to finish,
8. Uploaded the screencast to Screencast-o-Matic’s website,
9. Ripped audio from “How to Be Alone” YouTube video using Peggo,
10.Converted the mp3 file into a wav file using Zamzar so that I could import it into Screencast-o-Matic’s editor,
11.Added wav file to screencast and uploaded to YouTube,
12.Pulled embed from YouTube,
13.Voila, the vid below.

This work is a labor of idiocy. I stole time from two jobs to make time for this. I have farm chores and school chores that I ignored to do this. Was it worth it? I hope so.

1. I found out how much ‘hidden curation’ goes on. There are choices made all along the route toward a finished curation that are all basically parsing what stays and what goes.  For example, I got rid of all the navigational and social media links. Why? They weren’t specific content.  Once I decided on what to include I had to curate down to the level of the links I had on my list.  In other words I had choices I had made and now I needed to justify why I made them. I had to find something of value that the original Paper.li bot had found using the parameters set by Aldon Hynes. The next level we need a different filter. What could that be?  Similarities? Differences? Connections?  It seems like these filters are of two kinds: removers and leavers.  Remover filters  would be curation based upon some broad criteria like connected learning or relevance to #CLMOOC participants.  Anything that did not fit that filter would be removed.  Or perhaps it would be that anything that fit would be included.  Something tells met that is a spurious distinction, but another part me says there is a difference there somewhere, a distinction between positive and negative. Two kinds of curation: negative and positive.
2.  I found out that I had only done half the job. I need to curate my curations. And I need to do that using some kind of filter that is way less porous than the one I was using. And I need to record that using the same timeline. And I need the filters above.
3. I found out that if I only went out two degrees of separation I began to feel physically anxious. There was no ‘crossing of the hyperlink beams’ as I was spidering two links down so I am not sure how many degrees of separation would get me to a space where the links begin to repeat themselves.  Wouldn’t it be cool to have an app that would look at all the links on a page and then spider out with them until a message popped up on the screen, “Echo Chamber Degrees of Separation Reached”.  That might show you what your natural network was.
4. I found out that in order to even begin to reflect I had to use a lot repertoire.
5. I found out that this useful repertoire was all learned in the serious play I have engaged in over the last three summers in #CLMOOC
6. I found that I will need to do a play-by-play instead of a poem next time as my background to the screencast. While I don’t think anyone will look over this, if someone does they need a little bit more of an audio map for the screencast, an audio feldgang to accompany the video map.

The screencast above is final product (or as final and unpolished as I wanted it to be). What follows below is a the original curation that I screencast of Aldon Hynes’ Paper.li using Hackpad. I moved that curation to Hackpad because I could not embed the original etherpad.

Some initial reflection: