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New journalism 3.0 – aggregation, content farms and Huffinization

Journalists in the 21st century are expected to work for different platforms, gather online information, become multi‐media professionals, and learn how to deal with amateur contributions. The business model of gathering, producing and distributing news changed rapidly. Producing content is not enough; moderation and curation are at least as important when it comes to working for digital platforms. There is a growing pressure on news organizations to produce more inexpensive content for digital platforms, resulting in new models of low‐cost or even free content production. Aggregation, either by humans or machines ‘finding’ news and re‐publishing it, is gaining importance. At so‐called ‘content farms’ freelancers, part‐timers and amateurs produce articles that are expected to end up high in web searches. Apart from this low‐pay model a no‐pay model emerged were bloggers write for no compensation at all. At the Huffington Post thousands of bloggers actually work for free. Other websites use similar models, sometimes offering writers a fixed price depending on the number of clicks a page gets. We analyse the background, the consequences for journalists and journalism and the implications for online news organizations. We investigate aggregation services and content farms and no‐pay or low‐pay news websites that mainly use bloggers for input.

Space is the Place

Lecturers as curators of crossmedia resources: a literature review

In today’s era of content abundance, a huge amount of resources is available digitally, from research articles to news items and from online courses to YouTube videos. As a result, lecturers in higher education have an endless supply of crossmedia materials that they can present to students as learning materials. This presents lecturers with the challenge of selecting those materials in such a way that they match the course topic and prior knowledge and proficiency level of the students. Additionally, they need to consider how to structure resources and how to make connections between them in order to support students’ learning (Kallenberg, et al., 2009). It is often recognized (e.g. Anderson, 2015; Siemens, 2008) that this task is remarkably similar to the task of curators in museums, who expertly make selections and organize and contextualize artefacts (Bhaskar, 2016). Considering those similarities, surprisingly little is known about how lecturers conduct this task. This study investigates how lecturers in Dutch higher professional education select, structure and present crossmedia resources for educational purposes, from the perspective of curation. This paper aims to provide an overview of relevant research regarding “lecturers as curators” in the context of higher education. It will share the outcomes of a literature review, for which articles were identified in three databases (ERIC, Web of Science (WoS) and Catalogue Plus), using the search word “curation” combined with filters for the field of (higher) education. Only articles published in English in peer reviewed journals, institutional research reports and conference proceedings prior to November 2018 were selected. This led to a selection of 64 articles that focused on curation within higher education. Of these, 17 focused on curation of learning materials done by lecturers. Findings show that there is relatively little research into lecturers’ curational processes. Although most articles identify the notion of curation as a useful approach in teaching, they fail to describe overarching processes or criteria for succesful curation. Five of the reviewed studies describe curational practices by specific groups of lecturers, teaching a specific subject such as maths or music. Seven other studies focus on the outcome of lecturers’ curation processes, describing the curated collections that are the result of it. Additionally, two articles present a conceptual model of educational curation; namely Wolff & Mulholland’s (2013) Curational Inquiry Learning Cycle and Deschaine & Sharma’s (2015) 5C Model. Both models approach the process of curation as a sequential multistep model, in which steps cannot be seen independently: meaning is added with every step of the process. Although they use different terminology, steps such as collecting, selecting, organising, and presenting resources are identified. However, both models have not been tested empirically. The authors acknowledge the importance of this, by stressing that more research into the topic is necessary. The proposed paper will present a complete overview of the findings, summarize the two models, and indicate how these models can be a starting point for further empirical research.

Lecturers’ curational abilities

In today’s era of content abundance, education has to deal with changed practices for the dissemination of knowledge. Many digital resources are available, and they have the potential to take the place of textbooks. ‘The role of the classic textbook as the key, immutable reference point for any class subject, is rapidly fading’, says Good (2016). Educational publishers like Pearson see a decline in textbook use (Sweney, 2017), and a study at a Dutch university of applied sciences (Leighton, 2015) indicates that lecturers in higher education move away from core textbooks towards a variety of materials, including powerpoint slides, websites, and videos. Baron & Zablot (2015) complement this, saying ‘teachers now have the possibility to create and modify resources’. This development carries the risk that the structure, continuity and coherence textbooks are supposed to provide (Littlejohn, 2011), disappear. One could argue that when structure and coherence disappear from learning materials, the quality of education is at risk. To make the most of (digital) materials that teachers select, they must be organized well (Deschaine & Sharma, 2015). In order to do that, lecturers will have to act as skilled curators when selecting and structuring learning materials. Central in the concept of curation is that it goes beyond selection: providing coherence and context is what sets out curation from mere selection (Bhaskar, 2016). Considered from the perspective of teaching, curating means selecting and structuring learning content for students, while also providing them with context and coherence. The notion of lecturers as curators has been discussed by Siemens (2008), who describes the changing roles of lecturers and identifies ‘curational educators’ as those who ‘acknowledge the autonomy of learners, yet understand the frustration of exploring unknown territories without a map’. So far, the literature mainly focusses on providing students with curational skills, since these are important 21st century and media literacy skills (e.g. Jenkins et al., 2009; Potter, 2012). Little empirical research has been done when it comes to curational roles of lecturers. This proposed poster provides a mixed-methods research design for a PhD study.

The curatorial turn in tourism and hospitality.

Purpose: This study, a conceptual paper, analyses the growth of curation in tourism and hospitality and the curator role in selecting and framing products and experiences. It considers the growth of expert, algorithmic, social and co-creative curation modes and their effects. Design/methodology/approach: Narrative and integrative reviews of literature on curation and tourism and hospitality are used to develop a typology of curation and identify different curation modes. Findings: Curational techniques are increasingly used to organise experience supply and distribution in mainstream fields, including media, retailing and fashion. In tourism and hospitality, curated tourism, curated hospitality brands and food offerings and place curation by destination marketing organisations are growing. Curation is undertaken by experts, algorithms and social groups and involves many of destination-related actors, producing a trend towards “hybrid curation” of places. Research limitations/implications: Research is needed on different forms of curation, their differential effects and the power roles of different curational modes. Practical implications: Curation is a widespread intermediary function in tourism and hospitality, supporting better consumer choice. New curators influence experience supply and the distribution of consumer attention, shaping markets and co-creative activities. Increased curatorial activity should stimulate aesthetic and stylistic innovation and provide the basis for storytelling and narrative in tourism and hospitality. Originality/value: This is the first study of curational strategies in tourism and hospitality, providing a definition and typology of curation, and linking micro and macro levels of analysis. It suggests the growth of choice-based logic alongside service-dominant logic in tourism and hospitality.