We are currently examining different content curation services as to their strengths, weaknesses, ease of use, and usefulness to students. A very good guide to content curation developed by others can be found here:
Paper.li is a content curation service that quickly creates a newspaper-like publication for you. To start you simply create an account through Facebook, Twitter, or email. I would recommend investing in a “Pro account” because it allows you more options, such as advertisement-free newspapers. To begin creating your newspaper you can search keywords and Paper.li will automatically retrieve articles, videos, and photos from Twitter, Google+, and RSS feeds that are related to the topic you have selected. You can also find your own content. To do this you simply go to settings and drag the blue “Paper.li” button to your “favorites bar”. When you find an article you like you click on the Paper.li bookmarklet and select which newspaper to add the article to.
Once Paper.li has completed its retrieval for you, you can edit the layout and the title. You can delete any content you dislike or find irrelevant and you can add pictures and colors to the background to help liven up your newspaper. Upon the completion of your adjustments, you can select whether or not Paper.li should automatically publish each newspaper you create or whether you would like to save them as drafts until you feel the paper is sufficiently developed. You can also choose how often the Paper.li retrieves updates. You could update your paper each day, or less frequently. This allows for your subscribers to be reading the most up to date material on your topic.
Once you have decided your newspaper is complete and ready for publication, you can share it across several social media sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and you can email it to individuals. These same options are also available for each article within your newspaper. This feature allows you to promote your newspaper further and increases the likelihood of gaining subscribers. Subscribers are those who are allowed access to your newspapers. You also have the ability to control who can and cannot be a subscriber to your newspapers. Therefore, if you have a newspaper that is strictly for the workplace, you can customize that paper so only select individuals can view it.
One limitation of Paper.li is that each newspaper you create must be upgraded to Pro. Another limitation is that Paper.li occasionally does not find any content to publish. Therefore, some days your newspaper will be full of articles, videos, and images, and other days it will be a blank slate. A third problem I found occurred when creating my own newspaper. On Thursday I manually added all of my own content to a newspaper. Monday the paper had updated and but had only had two videos in it— supplying next to no news to subscribers. It seems as though we are not the only ones who struggle to actualize the potential of Paper.li as 2015 is the first time in six years that the site did not make Jane Hart’s Top 100 tools for learning.
Despite the flaws I’ve noted (which may be due to my inexperience with the tool) one very nice feature of Paper.li is that they have a video tutorials for just about every question a person could have. These videos exhibit step-by-step instructions on how to complete a tasks. Another beneficial aspect of Paper.li is the timely manner in which their customer service responds to assist your needs. Paper.li has considerable potential as a curating tool. However, it needs some major improvements.
Contact us if you’d like to see one off our early productions.
We welcome any feedback or learning from your experiences with Paper.li.
Day: December 15, 2015
What Good Books Have You Read This Year?
“What good books have you read this year?” recently asked my former student and fellow bibliophile, Susan Gusho recently on FaceBook. Susan, who like so many former students, continues to influence me in what I read and how I teach. Though I do not read as much or as widely as colleagues like Hugo Hartig, who since retiring, has often shared his annual reading list on FaceBook, I try to read books for pleasure on a regular basis.
Here are books I have read this year that were well worth my reading:
- David Mitchell’s Slade House: A Novel
- Lauren Groff’s Fate and Furies: A Novel
- Robert Galbraith’s (aka JK Rowling) Career of Evil (Comoran Strike)
- Carroll Colleague John Garrison’s Glass (Object Lessons)
- Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem and The Dark Forest. Alas, I must wait until August for the translation of the third part of this science fiction trilogy.
- Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman: A Novel
- Steven Jarvis’ Death and Mr. Pickwick: A Novel
- Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves: A Novel
- Ann Morgan’s The World Between Two Covers: Reading the Globe
- Naomi S. Baron’s Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World.
- Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven.
- Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See (Thank you, sister-in-law Becky O’Connor for giving this to me—and for instilling the love of reading in children and adults).
- Kazuo Ishhiguro’s The Buried Giant
- Sian Beilock’s How the Body Knows Its Mind: The Surprising Power of the Physical Environment to Influence How You Think and Feel.
On my short list of books to read (or finish) over the holiday break—I don my invisibility cloak from Carroll on December 18 until January 19)—- are the following:
- Brian Selznicks The Marvels
- Mark R. Schwen’s Leading Lives that Matter: What We Should Do and Who We Should Be.
- Douglas Rushkoff’s Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (Thank you, Davis Endries, for calling my attention to this book.)
- Jonathan Franzen’s Purity: A Novel
- Oliver Burkeman’s The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking. (Thank you, David Lewis for alerting me to this gem).
- Martin James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings. (Thank you, Susan Gusho, for sharing from Kansas your book recommendations. You know what I will like.)
- Maria Konnikova’s The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It Every Time.
- Roger Angell’s This Old Man: All in Pieces
- Joan Hustace Walker’s Great Pyrenees (Complete Pet Owners Manuals) (Recommended by Leo The Great)
Recommend to me some good books and prove to me that I have a reader or two:)
Happy Holidays.