I’ve figured myself out.

At TEDxNYED, Jeff Jarvis, a well known guy in the world of online journalism, spoke on the parallel worlds of journalists and educators.  He advocates the role of teacher be one focused on being a curator rather than a creator of knowledge.  High school social studies teachers don’t create new knowledge about the Vietnam War.  Furthermore, in the age of Google, they are no longer necessary in order to make information about the Vietnam War available to students.  Valuable teachers play the role of curator of what is known and available.

In Twitter parlance, “Do what you do best and link to the rest.”

I’ve been involved in this Web 2.0 world longer than most.  We all started by reading Will Richardson.  I quickly wanted more.  I focused on where he was drawing the information from that he was curating on http://weblogg-ed.com.  Back in the day, I could look at Will’s Bloglines account and see what he was subscribed to.  With a few simple clicks I could import his entire reading list.

While this seems simple, few services have figured out how to capitalize on connecting attention streams like Bloglines.  The only other company to do this well was Twitter.  Sadly, they killed off these features after a year when the service was growing faster than they could support.

If Web 1.0 was about connecting people to things, Web 2.0 is about connecting people to people.  If you are going to do Web 2.0 well, you need to spend a bit of time curating people.  If I’m following you, it’s likely that I’m also interested in the people you are following.  Even more interesting are the differences in the lists of people we are following.  Curating people is a black-belt 21st Century Skill™ that you won’t see listed in any formal lists.

I’ve been obsessed with this very question for the past five years.  I’m very librarian-like [#respect] in how I curate my feeds in Google Reader. They all get named FirstName LastName, thus changing them from “things” to “people”.  My Twitter client is always set to show full name instead of username.  If you are still anonymous or use a pseudonym with that information there’s likely an exceptional situation.

With that context (read:  more than you ever wanted to know about @ijohnpederson), here’s something important I’ve realized in the past year.

I’m far more interested, and better, in my role of curating and connecting people than I am about content.  In fact, I’ve come to tune most of it completely out of my attention stream.  I’m tired of arguing semantics of literacy and 21st century skills.  There are enough folks talking school reform that have opinions on education policy.  I’m done talking about blogging, handhelds, and how to use Twitter.  This past year I tried my hand at advancing online learning by recontextualizing the way I saw things big picture.  I  also got involved in leading online learning communities with a few people that do it better than anybody.  While I gained a bit of traction and valuable experience, I found it personally frustrating.

“Do what you do best and link to the rest.”

I’ve come full circle.  The majority of my time is immersed in informal, online, asynchronous learning.  It’s working from outside the system inwards.  It’s chipping away at the barriers that I spent most of my years behind.  The last piece of this puzzle is just setting in.  There are plenty of folks out there carrying the water of advancing policy, leadership, reform, projects, storytelling, cyberbullying, filtering, research, etc.  I’m letting go of curating the content and instead focusing on curating the people.