This semester, as I mentioned in my previous post, I’m taking an English class called New Media Writing, a 3000-level class that students can count towards the English major or the writing minor. My last post focused mainly on our “Nichepertise” projects and the fact that we have a lot of class discussions on Twitter, so this time, I want to talk about some of the cool technologies and social media sites we’ve been learning about.
Every Monday, groups of two or three students give a 15 to 30 minute presentation about a different social media platform that the presenters had never used. So far, I’ve seen presentations on We Heart It, an image bookmarking site; Hootsuite, a post scheduling site; and IFTTT, a site that lets users create “recipes” using components of different websites to generate new information. (It’s kind of tricky to explain, so you should check it out for yourself.)
Here are some of the affordances and constraints I quickly brainstormed soon after downloading Instagram back in September.
This week was my week to present, and my group and I gave a presentation about Instagram. While most of our classmates already had and were familiar with Instagram, the three of us who presented had just so happened to have never used it before. And the fact that the app is so popular made it a reasonable choice to analyze in terms of affordances, things technologies let us do, and constraints, limitations of technologies. We’ve learned that in spite of how they sound, affordances aren’t always good and that constraints aren’t always bad.
This handy adapter allowed me to project my iPhone for my entire New Media Writing class to see.
Part of our presentation involved us giving a demonstration of Instagram. Because one major constraint of Instagram is that its desktop website isn’t very functional, we knew that demonstrating Instagram using a computer instead of a smartphone wouldn’t be very engaging, in spite of the long list of constraints we could generate about it. Luckily, I had some vague recollection from last year that it’s possible to use a projector to project a smartphone screen, so I emailed the professor to see if he could make that technology available to us. Within an hour, he had emailed me back with a picture of an adapter that could hook up my iPhone 4S to part of the projection system.
Being able to hook my phone up to the projector definitely helped make my presentation more interesting and engaging. My classmates were intrigued the fact that doing such a thing was even possible, and they were entertained to see me take a picture of one of my group mates as a part of the presentation–as we set up the shot, it was kind of luck watching a live video feed of the classroom from my perspective. Also, with varied success, we got our classmates to tweet and Instagram about affordances and constraints that they encountered with Instagram, and we had a class-wide discussion to wrap up our presentation.
It’s amazing how something as simple as a smartphone adapter can catapult a presentation into the 21st century. There are so many technologies available in classrooms now that I didn’t have either when I started high school or when I graduated high school — the generation of high school students that followed me has had access to some pretty cool stuff, and given how quickly technology is growing, I can only imagine the sorts of stuff you’ll have access to once you’re students on the Hill!
And by the way — follow McDaniel Admissions on Instagram if you haven’t already!
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