Week 8 of EDCI 136 included lecture from two guest speakers, Dr. Remi Kalir who spoke on social curation and annotation, and Jessica Mussell who spoke about the software Zotero for curation and citations. This blog post will cover and summarize information from these lectures.
Social Curation is the process of sharing organized content with a relevant audience on social media platfroms. The benefits of social curation allows the creators of content to generate and grow a brand, attract new followers and to gain awarness of the content you are promoting.
Annotation for Kalir is a note added to a text which shows where you stand in a situation and also to contest and challenge the social context of text in the real world. Kalir used the example of a stop sign with text added below which stated that the stop sign in on indigenous land, essentially challenging the text (the stop sign) with a social issue (infrastructure being built on stolen indigenous land). Another example of annotation Kalir used was the photo of a former confederate statue being highlighted with projections of Black Lives Matter and a photo of George Floyd. Essentially, Kalir is trying too argue that annotations can be used to challenge social issues.
Scalzo, J. L. (2020). Photograph of George Floyd projected Robert E. Lee statue. shutterstock. Richmond, Virgina, U.S.A.
Jessica Mussell spoke on the software Zotero which assists students and professionals in citing sources, such as bibliographies. Zotero is an open access website which is designed to save times when citing articles. Zotero can be used to organize different articles by importing, images, papers etc and provide proper citations ranging from different forms of citations, such as APA and chicago.
In my opinion, generative AI tools can have a positive influence on university studies, rather then a negative one. For example, AI tools can be used for research purposes and improve accuracy through tools such as grammar checkers and citation machines. It’s important to educate students on how to use these tools the correct way, rather then avoid using the tools altogether.
This video is a great example of how students can use AI tools to improve their studies by using generative AI. One benefit of using these tools could be helping language studies.