If I am completely honest, curating assets for my projects this month did allow me to create great looking presentations. But it was my normal approach to curation – not the use of the Symbaloo tool that made it possible. The assets that I curated through iStockPhoto, and created through Adobe Spark are definitely worth keeping because I can reuse them again and again as part of another visual story I want to tell. Whether it’s about perseverance, or about overcoming obstacles, those assets will work well to evoke emotional reactions in that story.
Before entering the New Media Tools class I already had some solid curating habits – I used Feedly for article gathering and sourcing, Ember for grabbing clips of visual inspiration on the web – so this class reinforced the importance of curation before I start creating anything as a best practice.
I wouldn’t say that curating resources enriched m MCBS experience, it’s just a de facto part of the experience. I can’t create anything – graphics, video, long form copy – without first organizing my thoughts and curating the visuals to go along with them. So for me, curation is just a natural part of creating.
I think that Whitehead and Spiegel believe that the curation of quality assets is better than the curation of a quantity of assets is simple, it keeps you focused. When you amass a quantity of assets it’s hard to take them all in, to digest them all, and to find use for them all. In the end, you end up with many unused assets and quite a bit of wasted time. When you focus on curating quality assets you are forced to focus on solving for your need. This keeps you from distraction, from being overwhelmed by assets, and keeps you focused on getting what you need to tell your story, so your creativity can flourish.