The purpose of this blog is to record information regarding my major project for MA Creative Media.

After a long period of consideration I have decided to conduct a study of Pinterest as a Learning Tool for visual art students between 16-19 in Further Education. (Better title in the future hopefully)

The reason for my choice is based around personal experience as this will involve an ethnographic audience study of my AS and A2 Graphic Communication students and auto-ethnographic investigation of my own teaching practice.

Before delving into more academic underpinning, I think it is important to log some background information. Giving some details as to how I have come to this topic and fill in some key events that have already happened before this first blog post.

Approximately one year ago, I started an account with Pinterest.com, initially this was to archive a number of links which had been previously stored on delicious.com, and also aid my own academic studies by collecting useful non-academic references and examples in one place. Besides the usability of the site I also liked the visual way of storing and organising offered by Pinterest, as the layout of my boards/pins allows you to see at a glance what the pin was about and serve as a quick reminder as to why it was put there. (Pinterest uses very specific vocabulary to give metaphor to the usability – this will need a further post later)

As an MA student, It also allowed me in seminars to recall and demonstrate relevant examples to the other students without having to trawl through search engines or imputing lengthy web addresses into the browser.

Therefore the first boards set up were “Digital Media Design” and ‘Animation and Motion Graphics’, which originally contained pins taken from my Delicious account and “Digital Cities” set up as a study aid for the Module I was covering called “digital cities”, during this module three more boards were started to cover other aspects of my learning. Soon after boards were started to further categorise the study for Digital Cities. These were ‘3D Printing’, ‘Wearable Tech’ and ‘Digital Ghosts, Apparitions and Hauntings’ (since been renamed to ‘Digital Hauntings Data Traces and Digital Legacy’)

Screen shot of my Pinterest page: taken in May 2014 approx four months after I started using it.

Generally I am a very messy person, who aspires to be well organised. My house is extremely cluttered, I have clothes all over my bedroom, however Pinterest allows me to project a well organised persona – it projects the idea of an ordered mind and gives me a feeling of being in control of my learning and practice as an educator.

Through my own induction into the tool, over approximately six months, I considered using it in the classroom with my own students, and also suggested other members of staff in the department might want to make use of this with their students. Therefore, set up an account for my colleague populating her first three boards to introduce her students to the potential of Pinterest as a research tool for visual art students and teaching

When I started with a new set of students in September 2014 I decided that I would ask all the students to start a Pinterest account and then supply them with names for their first few boards, with requirements for numbers of pins and also requested that they follow me, in return I would follow them.

My aims and objectives for September 2014 were:

• to get all AS and A2 Graphic Communications students to use Pinterest, therefore I would aim to get them all registered with Pinterest as an induction activity in their first teaching session.
• to lead by example, meaning I would need to have active use of Pinterest linked to their curriculum and to actively participate with the tasks I set.
• to follow all the students and request for them to all follow me.
• to encourage students at least once a week to visit the site and make use of it, both at home and in the classroom.

My hopes were that:

• The students would become active users, developing their digital literacies, through encouraging students to curate personal collections/libraries
• By using social media, as a gamified technology, research would become a regular and ‘more fun’ activity.
• Using Pinterest as a Learning Technology would breakdown extend the classroom into a virtual/hybrid space and extend their independent learning.
• The classroom becomes a space for collaborative learning between staff and students and developing collective intelligence, where, technology can be utilized in the development of a learning community between teachers and staff.