Looking first to Clay Shirky who is generally very positive about the benefits of internet technology, particularly about unexpected benefits through peoples behaviour and the need for communication rather than systems being designed with these outcomes in mind. He is also generally in praise of the amateur and the part they play in creating content.

Shirky C. (2008) Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. Penguin Books, London UK

“Human beings are social creatures – not occasionally or by accident, but always. Sociability is one of our core capabilities and it shows up in almost every aspect of our lives as both cause and effect”p14

From sociability comes communities. – Thinking about group work and how it is important to value all the others who have an opportunity to affect learning – although not working on group projects, instead the dynamics of having a learning community, where the group is beneficial to the individual. Through working towards common goals groups help each other to achieve. Being a student is a collaboration with friends, teachers and internet based strangers and yet I often forget this aspect of learning.

“We are so natively good at group effort that we often factor groups out of our thinking about the world.”p16

A teaching and learning group is people working together towards common goals as well as individual ones and new technology expands a group beyond traditional boundaries.

“When we change the way we communicate we change society” p17

“We are living in the middle of a remarkable increase in our ability to share, to co-operate with one another and to take collective action, all outside the framework of traditional institutions and organizations”.p20-21

Chapter: Publish then Filter – discusses open technologies for self-publication of content by amateurs, relevant for Pinterest as this can be seen as a filtering system, allowing people to build personalised libraries. That the act of filtering is a creative act.

Also that Pinterest allows access to multiple amateur content that has not gone through a process of being sanctioned as ‘good quality’ research resources, as books in the library have.

“Mass amateurization of publishing makes mass amateurization of filtering a forced move.”p98 – To gather meaningful resources we have to do the filtering and curating ourselves, or rely on others to do it for us, as otherwise this content ends up being inaccessible.

“We are living in the middle of the largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race.”p106

“Every new user is a potential creator, and consumer, and audience whose members can cooperate directly with one another, many to many, as a former audience.”p106

Shirky C. (2010) Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, Allen Lane: Penguin Books, London UK.

People look for things to do to fill their time and society has a surplus of ‘free time’, this is time that we have previously filled with watching TV and other one-way forms of media. However, this surplus of time can be used to do something that requires more action and thought. Social media allows the surplus of time to become ‘cumulative thought’ and people can work together. Shirky uses the example of Wikipedia.

“One thing that makes the current age remarkable is that we can now treat free time as a general social asset that can be harnessed for large, communally created projects, rather that a set of individual minutes to be whiled away one person at a time.”p10

“Young populations with access to fast interactive media are shifting their behaviour away from media that presupposes pure consumption”p11

“Participants are different. To participate is to act as if your presence matters, as if, when you see something or hear something, your response is part of the event.”p21

He uses an example he calls “Milkshake mistakes” p12-14 to make a point about how to study a topic, that you should not focus on the tools/products and instead look at behaviour i.e. how people use and shape the tools to fit their needs. Meaning he advocates an ethnographic approach to study.

“The social uses of our new media tools have been a big surprise, in part because the possibility of these uses wasn’t implicit in the tools themselves. A whole generation had grown up with personal technology, from the portable radio through the pC, so it was natural to expect them to put the new media tools to personal use as well. But the use of a social technology is much less determined by the tool itself; when we use a network the most important asset we get is access to one another.”

“Our cognitive surplus is only potential it doesn’t mean anything or do anything by itself”p27

People need: Means, Motive and Opportunity i.e. how, why and when/where/with whom.

Thinking about engagement:

Fostering engagement with Pinterest to enable students to engage deeper with their learning has  been a key aim for me.

Shirky makes reference to engagement throughout a discussion about the transition of amateur hobbies from being hidden and under-appreciated before social media to visible and valued. Because the amount of amateur-made content (as well as professionally-made) is vast due to the simplicity of the system for self-publication and the need for self-expression

“The flow of amateur production and organization far from stabilizing, continues to increase, because the social media rewards our intrinsic desires for membership and sharing  as well”p88 (links to his thoughts on people being naturally social)

“personal motivations and social ones amplify each other in a feedback loop”p88

“Indulgence in feelings of membership and sharing can increase our desire for more connectedness, which increases its expression, and so on.”p88

Projects do not happen in isolation the group have influence over the outcomes:

“We create opportunities for one another that we wouldn’t otherwise have. By treating each other well (fairly, if not always nicely), we can create an environment where the group can do more than the individuals could do on their own.”p98

“If a tool is useful, people will use it”p100

“Every surprising bit of new behaviour described here has two common elements: people had the opportunity to behave in a way that rewarded some intrinsic motivation, and those opportunities were enabled by technology but created by human beings. Those bits of new behaviour, though are extensions of, rather than replacements for, much older patterns of our lives as social creatures.”p101

“A sense of membership, of belonging, to a group that is animated by a shared vision or project, can spark a feedback loop in which autonomy and competence improve as well. People who are part of a network where they become better at something they love tend to stay.”p103 In other words: if students can see real benefits to their knowledge and creative outcomes (and are rewarded for this) should become further engaged with the system.

“The hothouse environment of a collaborative circle can make the ideas and achievements of the participants develop faster than if the participants were all pursuing the identical goals without sharing.”p103

Leadbeater C. (2008) We Think, Profile Books, London UK

Leadbeater looks at the collaborative nature of internet technology and generally sees it as a creative and democratizing technology. One definition used for the Internet is that “it is just a tool to do what we have always done but it allows us to do it more quickly and to reach a larger audience”pxxv

Like Shirky, Leadbeater uses examples of amateur publication that are only possible through utilising internet (and specifically social media) technology. However, he uses the metaphor of Boulders vs Pebbles, where old media industries are the boulders (large, cumbersome and not easy moved) and the new media users are the pebbles (small, multiple and movable), where “A bewildering array of pebbles are being laid down the whole time, in no particular order, as people feel like it” pxx

That before the internet objects had to go through a process of review by gatekeepers who would add their judgements of quality and taste before the object could be placed in the public domain. Internet based technology means that objects can bypass this system through self-publication and therefore this means that I and my students have access to many more images than before from many amateurs as well as professional image makers. This requires a process of ordering and sorting so that these images are more than just a ‘bewildering array’, and this is where Pinterest comes in.

Leadbeater considers some of the debates surrounding internet technology and suggests that our exposure to “more frequent, hyper-accelerated and hyper-connected”, pxxv media, means there are more opportunities to question issues but less time to think about them. Pinterest may give more opportunities to view and organise images, however this may mean there is less time to analyse them.

“Critics worry the web is uprooting the authority of experts, professionals and institutions, which help us to sort truth from falsehood, knowledge from supposition, fact from gossip. Instead the web is licensing a cacophonous mass in which it is increasingly difficult to discern the truth as experts themselves are drowned out by low grade amateurs”pxxvii It is not to be underestimated students must be taught to question the media that they experience in a more analytical way, rather than just teaching them to analyse the meaning of the image, to also think about the process of mediation, which is not part of my current curriculum. There were obvious positives about the old publishing system as it was built on a system of trust, i.e. we were led to believe that the choice to place an image in a book was that it was ‘worthy’ of our consideration and the people who placed it there held positions of authority based on their credentials.

“The boulders may have been cumbersome but they filtered the good from the bad before it was published. In web world things get published first and then filtered afterwards depending on people’s notions of them”pxxvii

Pinterest allows students access to multiple images from multiple sources and therefore, their understanding of ‘good and bad’ has the possibility of being widened. Although these images may be plentiful they are not necessarily ‘trustworthy’, their knowledge may be gained through a set of falsehoods. Images out of context (wrong size, poor colour, poor resolution, cropped etc), images with incorrect information (names, tags and definitions are wrong) and how they have been indexed may add another dimension of mediation, (what other images are they placed next to, what name does the set have, who is the ‘pinner’ and what was their intention for placing the image there), therefore the benefits of the technology must be assessed alongside other issues.

“The web provides more opportunities for participation, critical thinking and searching that say sitting in front of a television or simply copying facts from a blackboard. Far from losing a sense of identity younger generations growing up with the web seem both more individualistic and more collaborative than their elders”pxxviii

You are what you share – many of us turn to the web for news, information, entertainment, and conversation, for example we turn away from newspapers, television, film, libraries, bookshops. That may liberate us from the control of a cultural elite -editors and publishers, critics and commentators who used to oversee what we read and thought. Yet the orgy of user-created content the web has attracted might also rob us of high quality journalism and literature, film and music as the institutions that train and employ professionals find their economic foundations eaten away. P2/3

We may come to rue the YouTube cultural revolution if it banishes the gatekeepers of quality and culture to the digital wastelands.p3

Working together creatively on the web will spread democracy, promote freedom, alleviate inequality. If not then it might lead to anarchy, where ideas and technologies that were once in the hands of professionals get into the hands of people who cannot be trusted.

What we share is as important as what we own.p6
In the economy of ideas you are what you share -who you are linked to, who you network with and which ideas, pictures, videos, links or comments you share. P6
At root most creativity is collaborative; it is not, usually the product of a lone individuals flash of insight. The web gives new ways to organise and expand this collaborative activity. P7

For the generations growing up with social networking sites, multiplayer computer games, free software and virtual worlds, the reflexes learned on the web will shape the rest of their lives: they will look for information themselves and expect and welcome opportunities to participate, collaborate, share and work with their peers.p7/8

Leadbeater is enthusiastic about the web being a meritocracy, he is positive about quality that comes from professionals and academics or where the group is working towards something worthy, however is not quite so positive about amateurs or those who are working towards projects that aren’t for the greater good of society. Regularly using these descriptive words : cacophony, chaos, and anarchy
Places those who contribute new things above those who just recirculate, however re circulation creates order and he is keen on order.  “The web is rich but messy”p36
Saying “the web will work best for us when the power of mass collaboration orders the chaos of mass-self expression.”p36

Collage and pastiche, recombining ingredients provided by others, were central not just to Situationism but to futurism, cubism, Dadaism and pop art. P45/46

Creativity emerges when people with different vantage points, skills and know how combine to produce something new.
It is changing how we share ideas and so how we think. P19

Creativity is invariably a collaborative activity that thrives when people share and mix ideas allowing them to cross pollinate. P20

However,
More often than not they produce a deafening babble or a deadening consensus, vicious disagreement or resounding reinforcement of already entrenched positions. P20

He suggests that innovation comes from an intellectual commons

The social approach to creativity encouraged by the web is reviving one of creativity’s oldest forms – folk – by empowering a mass of amateurs to create and share content. P56
Over the next few years we are likely to witness the growth of an enormous, collaborative, digitally enabled vernacular culture that will be both democratic and creative than what preceded it but also more raucous and out of control.p56/7 Sounds like he is keen on the opportunities of the technology but not the quality of the outcomes

I am teaching the students to look outwards for their ideas, to respond to the work of others and am starting to break down the hierarchy of quality by encouraging them to look beyond the traditional gatekeepers of culture. However it is still important to attribute where these ideas have come from, and the pinterest page serves as this evidence.
We think is important as it mixes the old with the new

Of course the individual is still central as the exposure alone does not lead to the outcomes.

He places a hierarchy into the type of collaborative systems and situation, describing these on a scale from No We Think. To Full We Think. Pinterest would sit as medium we think as it encourages participation and connections but there is little collaborative activity.
Collaborative filtering, reviews and social tagging through which people find interesting material on the web fit into this category. P86