As a marketing tool, how can "Content Marketing" be used as teaching tool in higher education? We tried to provide an answer to this concern by exploring François Arnal works.
"Curator" is a term used in museums. It refers to the person who chooses artworks for an exhibition, the curator is called upon to make a choice, a comment and an introduction of some existing works. He is the link between the artist (or the cultural heritage) and the public. He is an expert. The curator on the Internet, after defining the topics of his technological watch, may choose to work from a curation platform allowing him to automatically or manually harvest, filter, editorialise and share some online content.
Web 2.0, which now amounts to an audience of more than one billion people, influences our didactic practices. What is changing today in didactic postures is the virtual presence of a student on the web who, in addition to having a teacher, can interact with millions of people for free. This situation forces us to move from a one-way pedagogy to a participatory and contributory pedagogy. Indeed, through social networks, we even end up into situations where a student get in touch with people having a high level of expertise. The teacher should therefore recycle "Web-marketing" strategies in order to build a digital didactic strategy that allows the acquisition, and above all, the sharing of information and knowledge.
Thus, if curation tools are originally intended for businesses and the general public, digital monitoring tools can nevertheless be used by teachers and learners.
The dual objective for the teacher is, on one hand, to thoroughly understand social networks, access to information and digital identity design, and on the other hand, to gain access to information, and therefore to knowledge.
A first step may be for the teacher to acquire these tools and to make them available to his students through an effective and operational digital environment.
A second milestone is reached when students access the digital tool not as mere consumers, but as producers of knowledge. The student becomes an actor. And curation allows them, among other things, to learn and control the flow of information, to classify them, to package them and to offer them to others in a sharing community and in a context of mutual exchanges. His interest in this theme makes him an 'expert' in the field of information sharing or in a specific area of knowledge.
Through an elaborate content strategy that allows the student to search for information, to grasp it, to modulate it and to relay it while issuing a critical opinion; the age of vertical knowledge (from the teacher above, to the student below) is replaced by another mode of cognitive transmission: horizontal or reticular. It's a horizontal transmission because the hierarchy is shaken up. The student may then teach the teacher; or he may lecture, learn from, and interact with other students.
[Translated from a contribution by Antoine Mian]