Final English 211G Blog Entry

English 211G or Writing in the Humanities & Social Sciences - Cyberwriting: Blogging, Social Media, & Future Texts is a course I took as one of the options to fulfill a core requirement in the Library Science Associate of Applied Science Degree. The Writing in the Humanities & Social Sciences courses have different focus options. The Cyberwriting: Blogging, Social Media, & Future Texts focus seemed the most relevant to my career goal of becoming a librarian.

The semester culminated in a final assignment to create a module for a future class. The group I was in for this assignment consisted of Autumn, Carolanne, and myself. Our decision process wasn’t particularly extensive or elaborate. Carolanne suggested Pinterest and we went with it. I can’t speak to the reasons that my group mates were interested in creating a module covering Pinterest. I was interested in doing it because I’ve never had an account on Pinterest.

For me, half the fun was that I was going into this project knowing the bare minimum about Pinterest. For instance I knew that it was picture heavy and somehow like using a bulletin board, but on the Web.

Having Fall Break right at the beginning of this module got us off to a slow start. Although we decided on Pinterest on November 16th, we didn’t divvy up the tasks until November 30th. We worked with the same group from previous group assignments and used Hangouts to communicate. Unfortunately we did lose one of our group members. Honestly we did not do as good a job of communicating for this project as in previous projects. Although I tried to keep us moving forward in communication, I think the group member we lost was much better at that particular task.

To complete this module, we needed to produce four items - an assignment, a discussion, a quiz, and blog entry instructions. Carolanne completed our assignment, Autumn completed our discussion, and I took on the quiz and blog entry instructions.

Over Fall Break, I did some searching on the World Wide Web to find resources for our module. I put what I found in a Google Doc and shared it with the group, inviting them to add more. In the end, I placed seven of the links I found, three to informational articles and four to ‘how to’ resources, into our module.

One interesting thing I learned when looking for resources for our module was that Pinterest had a massive overhaul earlier this year and many of the resources available showed the old interface. Luckily the interface changes were not extreme. I kept searching for videos until I found one that used the new interface for the ‘how to’ section. I didn’t want people to be confused by an old interface in a video.

vs.

I believe that Autumn, Carolanne and I all considered our audience for this project to be people in a community college English class. This meant putting together something for a group with some people interested in Pinterest as a social media platform, but also some who might not be particularly interested. Throughout the semester I noticed that most of the modules had some students who displayed little interest in the particular social media platform being covered. However, one of the purposes of taking a class is to stretch one’s boundaries.

From the technical end, creating the framework to attach our assignment, discussion, quiz, and blog entry assignment was fairly easy. I’m comfortable and happy playing with computer interfaces. The video provided by the instructor was enough to get me going setting things up in Canvas. I did read through the other Canvas tutorial links provided for fun, but they weren’t necessary. Although I volunteered to do the framework for our module, I made sure to leave it up to Autumn & Carolanne to post their own sections in our Canvas module so that they would not miss out on the experience of creating something in Canvas.

For my portions, aside from finding the resources and the administrative task of creating the framework, I made a quiz and a blog entry.

For the the first part of the quiz, I used some short answer questions that would require students to have done the readings and also do a bit of critical thinking. The second part of the quiz was a practical exercise that would allow students to demonstrate that they had some basic knowledge of using Pinterest.

Sample Short Answer Quiz Question

Sample Practical Quiz Question

For the blog post, I considered how throughout the course our instructor had given us academic blog post assignments that related to the module at hand, but went beyond just the particular social media platform to larger issues. Pinterest is a social media platform where people classify objects and share that classification. The blog entry assignment I chose was write a critical response to A Brief Introduction to Folksonomy, which is the kind of classification that people are doing on Pinterest, whether they know it or not.

Despite the slow start, and our somewhat shaky communications, our group got the module completed and turned in before the deadline.

This is my last English 211G Blog entry. Now I have to decide what to focus on for this blog in the future. Any thoughts?