Curation as a new literacy practice

Curating, as a verb, incorporates many sub-components and actions; it suggests at least the following: collecting, cataloguing, arranging and assembling for exhibition, displaying. As well as the institutional and professional contexts for such work through the centuries and across cultures, many people have made personal collections of texts and artefacts that have stood for them in the world, in some ways, as representing a nexus of relationships, affiliations and markers of identity (Miller, 2008). As with so many aspects of life and cultural practices we should not expect people’s use of digital media to do anything other than change significantly the ways in which curation operates. Indeed it has been suggested that curation itself is now a metaphorical new literacy practice which incorporates the collection, production and exhibition of markers of identity through time in both digital production and social media (Potter, 2012). Such curated media collections and performances are provisional and contingent, permanent or transient and involve varying degrees of agency on the part of the end user, along with risk, opportunity and personal efficacy. For all ages this involves engaging and developing skills and dispositions which enable agency in some way; curatorship is to curation as authorship is to writing. New or adapted skill sets in new media are nascent in people of all ages but suggest certain ways of being and learning for younger people in formal or informal settings of learning. For the purposes of this special issue in E-learning and Digital Media we are defining curation/curatorship in new media as a distinctive new literacy practice and we are exploring through the articles the ways in which this impacts on, or is evidenced in, activity in a variety of spaces.