An Exploratory Study on Students’ Digital Curation Competency and Experience in a General Education Course

Abstract

Essential in this information landscape, digital curation is broadly defined as the practices of digitally organizing and re-presenting the cultural record of humankind for creating value and impact, producing visual and textual information for presenting a narrative to audiences. Despite the prevalence of our daily-life curatorial practices and being well-suited to a diversity of disciplines, training in digital curation knowledge and skills has not been democratized to be inclusive for students from non-technical backgrounds. This pilot study 1) proposes a maker activity, namely creating digital galleries of cultural heritage, in a general education course, 2) examines to what extent this learning activity helps develop digital curation competency of undergraduate students, and 3) investigates how this digital curation experience benefits their professional and personal pursuits.