Why do you scoop?

«There is the tool, of course, but there is also the community» – according to President of Scoop.it Marc Rougier. Launched in 2011, it already had 75 million visitors by June 2013 (Read about this here, where I borrowed the picture, too). I asked my students two questions about this today, and I thought you might be interested in hearing some of their answers:

1. What is the purpose of Scoop?

• The purpose of scoop is to dig in to whatever topic you find interesting and reveal more and more facts which strengthens or changes your opinions about the current topic.
• to share information with other people in the world
• Share and spread information in a effective and smart way. Kind of similar to twitter, but instead of retweet you rescoop. Lets you type in different keywords and then finds different articles for you to scan.
• The purpose of Scoop is to gather relevant articles or videos about everyday topics.
• The purpose of Scoop is finding information in a new way, not all of them has a good function though.

2. Internet guru Howard Rheingold describes «smart learning» like this: «stumble on something, become curious, ask others, and then look to where others point». What does this mean? Do you think it is good advice?

• It means that you should be curiuos, check with different sources, and where the different sources point you to. Most important of all of this is that you should be critical to what you discover. I think it is a good advice as long as you take distance from some of the things you read and discover. It is vital to be able to see what others think and create your own opinion
• It means that you should research what you are trying to figure out. Do not just settle with the first thing you find out.
  I think this is good advice because the learning becomes more comprehensive.
• Yes, its good to be curious, and to ask and get more info from other people

So there you go. I have asked for permission to show some of the «insights» that my  students have to write when they scoop an article:

«This article tells us about child labour in Apple fabrics. Shocking results»

«This video shows us an overwiev of how the system of child labour in India works. It tells us about the ignorance of the community, as well as the denial of childhood. To me it opened my eyes to all the differences there are in the world and to the fact that I should appreciate my life as it is»

«This article describes the situation of companies utilizing children in their production. It also tells about how no company wishes to be associated with underage labour as a subject. This article gave a larger view of the situation how the companies and producers think towards the situation, which made a bigger impact on me.»

Clever students seems to follow this pattern:

1. Summary of main ideas

2. Personal opinion, response etc.

I would also like to include a third point, encouraging them to be more network minded:

3. Critical question or connection to other ideas (ie something that can challenge the readers of their insights)

Do not forget to check me out on Scoop: http://www.scoop.it/u/hernesvold