According to Deborah Lupton, who did research work on Pinterest, this social media platform has the potential to be of great value to sociologists and scientists. Some school teachers are already using Pinterest as a pedagogical resource, but this does not apply to academics.
Pinterest is relevant for the purposes of curating, displaying and (we could add) sharing images related to the topic being researched or taught about. The purposes mentioned by Deborah Lupton for the use of Pinterest by sociologists are suitable to a mere student or professor.
Broadly, you can use Pinterest boards as:
- Disclosure and promotion of your academic work (your published material on books, blog posts and the websites) and material on the themes you are studying (like infographics, tables, mind maps). You can also use boards to promote research and teaching initiatives at an institutional level.
- Repository of images on a specific learning topic;
- Aggregation of images from other users which are relevant for your working topic.
To use Pinterest as a pedagogical tool:
- Create a board on a subject you are teaching, use somebody else’s board or reuse pins from other boards;
- Ask students to create their own boards (or preferably a collaborative one) so that this might trigger comment, analyses, discussion and writing of texts (essays, etc.);
- Collaborate with other academics to share ideas and resources for teaching.
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