Curating resources with eLink

Content curation is basically the process of finding, synthesizing and sharing digital information. Indeed this skill is built into our new Master of Health Studies 601 course.

For an introduction to this key 21st Century skill see this excellent summary by Kay Oddone. From her work I discovered eLink, an easy tool to use for content curation. This tool is simple and free to use and it looks great.

Here I will outline how you can use eLink.

First, you sign up for eLink. You can sign up by creating an account or automatically sign-up by connecting with Facebook (consider security implications of this though).

Once signed in, you can create a new eLink from the Dashboard page. As you can see I have made a few, but I will show how to make a new list in the video below.

Once published you can share the link or embed the eLink in a webpage or in Moodle (and other LMSs I presume).

Here is what it looks like to embed the eLink:

But the real power of a curation tool like this is the ability to add to the list on the fly. With the Chrome extension you can instantly add resources to any existing list. I will show an example of this in the video below by adding to the above resource....you can see the eLink above now has 4 resources. After I completed the step below it automatically updated the eLink.

Of course, you can change the format and look of the eLink. The 'links' can be in simple lists or fancied up with images and more explanations and descriptions. These can be used for personal and professional purposes as well as education, marketing and so on.