Knowledge Communities On Pinterest

 As the week is coming to an end for EME 6414 I thought I would go through one final reading for the week as I compose my final blog post. I took a look at an article from Hu, Torphy, Opperman, Jansen, and Lo regarding knowledge communities on Pinterest. They focus on the informal learning that takes place through Pinterest, an online platform where individuals can post images of projects that they have been working on to spark discussions regarding best practices in the classroom or other topics that may come up. 

Not surprisingly, the authors found that Pinterest was the most popular form of social media use to share technology ideas for the classroom. Through the process of sharing ideas, the authors point out that social capital is developed among educators on Pinterest through this unique Social Knowledge Community. This is simply to say that when teachers are looking for new ideas they turn to those that they see as peers and mentors through this social space. Yet, what is special about the Web2.0 space provided by pinterest is that the normal heirarchies that are present within the traditional education setting are not always present, or even known, on this platform. 

Pinterest is also a special platform for studying teacher interaction and community building because of the way that it interweaves with and shares knowledge across many different websites. Yet, through their actions in drawing upon all of the knowledge on Pinterest and linked to Pinterest, teachers engage in the process of curation. That is they determine among the many and varied types of ideas and knowledge on Pinterest exactly the types of materials that they feel would fit best with their own teaching methods and the learning styles of their classroom. 

Ultimately the authors conclude that teachers often are not finding the types of support that they need to be effective in the 21st century classroom through traditional methods alone. Instead, instructors increasingly turning to sources like Pinterest to engage with other teachers and find the content that best suites them and their students.