“The flexibility and creativity of this platform and their facility with posting and viewing text and images in this way yielded strong work, critique, and analysis in ways that directly fed into our class discussions.”
This weeks reading addressed and explored the learning and educational potential of instagram. It discussed the pros of instagram and other apps like it in nature compared to their other more academic oriented counterparts. One of the points and arguments it specifically makes is that the stronger than normal responses the teacher noticed was due to the pre existing familiarity and freedom that was part of the students inherent view of the app. These Ideas tie into the overall theme of this week by exploring the idea that non academic apps could possibly be better learning environment and mediums than academic ones.
“Some students made memes, which takes a deep understanding of the material, and I love the remixing of old and new media forms.”
I found this quote to be thought provoking in that it took something that is widely seen as stupid or the opposite of educational such as a meme and argued its actual potential for learning. In this quote it says that in order to create a meme about a given subject it requires a deep understanding of the material. I totally agree with this since the very nature of many memes is a deep rooted irony or sarcasms both of which require advanced thought in order to see its comedic value. This quote just made me wonder what other cultural mediums such as memes are being over looked or demonized by academia when in reality they could be hugely valuable educational tools.
” I found these posts were of much higher quality than any Moodle posts had been in past classes, perhaps because of the reflection and thought required in pairing text and image, or the accessibility of the technology and their ease with the platform.”
I found this concept of familiarity being reflected in their comfort and quality of work to be very interesting. It seems obvious but I had really never thought about how big of an impact familiarity can have on the quality of work from students, but thinking about it now it makes total sense. Familiarity creates a sense of confidence which could potentially lead to more effort and bolder entries. This Idea of confidence leading to better student responses is really fascinating to me and males me wonder where else this concept could be applied. Overall this article did a good job of raising points and discussing how just because a medium isn’t designed to be academic in nature doesn’t mean it can’t be an educational tool.
