A sage, as I mentioned the other day, is a great method of curation. You can glean insight from their experience and knowledge.
An algorithm can be an effective method of curation – it uses machine learning to suggest new media or ideas to you.
Another method of curation I always celebrate this time of year is diverse student experience. For our high school cabaret show each year, we select a broad theme and allow students to pick songs within the theme. (It might be a decade, like the ’70s, or a band, like the Beatles, or a genre, like Broadway, or something more conceptual, like singer-songwriter-pianists.)
Each student approaches this theme through their own life experience, and auditions with a song that reflects what they consider the best for them and of the theme’s possibilities.
What that means for me, every year, is that I am exposed to a few or many new songs or artists. Even though I know a lot of music from the theme, I don’t know it all, and my students have all had different life experiences than I. And because they only can perform one song, I’m guaranteed to a relatively high hit-to-miss ratio. (They generally skip the real duds from the theme).
In the end, I get to work with about 35-40 songs, many of which I already knew, but some which are new to me and destined to become future favorites.
It’s a distributed model of curation, harnessing the brainpower of many students.