While updating the Cool Tools for Schools lesson on Curation today, I ran across ZEEF, a curation platform that in some ways harkens back to early days of web directories like Yahoo’s subject guides and DMOZ.
Though it appears that anyone can create a curated collection page on ZEEF and share it with others, only the best collections/directories are included in their official directory listings. A nice combination of options, letting members create pages that are useful as resources for limited groups or just for themselves. And also encouraging subject experts to put in the effort to create valuable subject listings.
I created a test collection for the Cool Tools workshop to see how the process works. Each page you create contains blocks of content containing RSS feeds or individually entered links. I added the RSS feed from our Cool Tools news feed in one block and links to some of the lessons in the workshop in another. I could imagine adding other blocks with lists of my 5 or 10 favorite tools from each lesson.
A handy feature is the ability to use blocks of content from other pages. I found a nice page on education tools and added a block on Virtual Field Trips and Presentation Tools. There’s a feature to share a block of content via social media and also to embed content within other web pages. Other members can also suggest content for your pages.
A Subjects page lists the officially published collections. And the search box surfaces all public pages, whether they’ve achieved “published” status or not.
ZEEF has a very strong technology and web development focus, but it wasn’t hard to find some interesting education oriented pages too. For example:
- Education Apps by Katie Williams
- LIS by Vivek Yadav
- An terrific page of Content Curation tools by Robin Good (how meta – a curated resource of curation tools on a great curation platform)
- Multimedia Storytelling by Melanie Fazer
I don’t expect that my Cool Tools page will ever get officially published, in fact I might be disappointed in the quality control if it did get published! It’s too much of a special purpose collection and draws too much on content from others.
Whether you create any content or not, add ZEEF to you list of discovery tools, lots of great stuff here.
(and if you’re wondering why “zeef” – it means sieve in Dutch!)
