This experimental session seeks to harness the pedagogical hivemind of AoIR2018 to explore, test and share new ways of using visual social media apps to critique and make visible social and cultural issues, boundaries and materialities. Building on the pedagogical prototyping undertaken as part of the Selfies Course preconference at AoIR2014 in Daegu, (see Albury, Leaver, Marwick, Rettberg, & Senft, 2017), this experimental session asks participants to work together in exploring new ways that visual social media tools can be rapidly—and without any additional resourcing or costs—be deployed in the classroom (and other learning contexts) to unsettle and explore the everyday. While selfies remain central in visual social media, this session will also seek to explore other forms including memes, looping media (such as animated GIFs) and so forth (see Ask & Abidin, 2018; Highfield & Leaver, 2016; Miltner & Highfield, 2017). Participants will work in small groups to scope the social and cultural issue(s) they most immediately want to tackle. Each group will then, in dialogue with the experimental session instigators, undertake a rapid design process to sketch out a learning exercise that could be undertaken by any group with access to visual social media apps. Each group will present their prototype, which will then be tested out by other groups in the session. Once a swift but thorough testing phase is completed, the merits of each prototype will be documented and the instigators will work with participants to (very quickly) document each useful prototype to then be shared publicly both for the AoIR community, and teachers anywhere and everywhere. At the sessions end we seek to have (a) rapidly prototyped a range of hands-on visual social media teaching exercises, (b) tested the most promising of these exercises with the experimental session participants and (c) created an on-the-fly shared public resource documenting these exercises to be shared within the AoIR community of teachers as well as publicly for pedagogical use anywhere they might be of value. Participants in this experimental session are requested to bring their pedagogical enthusiasm, willingness to participate, and a mobile device ideally with Instagram, Snapchat and any other visual social media tools you wish to explore already installed ready to use!
References
Albury, K., Leaver, T., Marwick, A. E., Rettberg, J. W., & Senft, T. M. (2017). The Selfie Course: More than a MOOC. In R. Bennett & M. Kent (Eds.), Massive Open Online Courses and Higher Education: Where to Next? (pp. 168–182). London and New York: Routledge.
Ask, K., & Abidin, C. (2018). My life is a mess: self-deprecating relatability and collective identities in the memification of student issues. Information, Communication & Society, 1–17.
Highfield, T., & Leaver, T. (2016). Instagrammatics and digital methods: Studying visual social media, from selfies and GIFs to memes and emoji. Communication Research and Practice, 2(1), 47–62.
Miltner, K. M., & Highfield, T. (2017). Never Gonna GIF You Up: Analyzing the Cultural Significance of the Animated GIF. Social Media + Society, 3(3)
