Selfie Pedagogy I - IV

Selfie I
Starting with the first link, it is evident that academics have begun to follow and study online culture, particularly the culture of selfies. I was surprised to find an entire syllabus surrounding selfies as a university course. I thought it might be by a bunch of Californians, but that's not the case. The people spearheading the project are from all over the globe. And I got to see their selfies.

One great thing about the selfie project is the sharing. If it's going to be considered scholarly, you have to convince skeptics. The way to do that is to share what you've learned.

 “I benefitted from their syllabuses and their scholarship,” Posner said. “I felt I was entering into a community that had done this for a long time, and they were generous enough to share what they had learned.”

Selfie II

Marwick wrote a paper on the "duck face."

Marwick, the Fordham professor who shared the Selfie Course, talks about how people are able to disseminate information to a much wider audience than ever. Before, only celebrities or politicians had access to the media that we all now have access to. Also, she tries to study what leads to popularity on sites such as Twitter and Instagram.

...she resigned herself to accepting that there might sometimes be “no reason,” because “popularity begets popularity.” 

  “Whenever you have a topic that is intrinsically sexy, it gets a lot of media attention. Social media scholars have been looking at this stuff for over a decade.” 


Interesting that she collaborated on the Selfie Course through Skype discussions and google docs. I think that's pretty mainstream now.

As an “old school web geek” with a “year 2000 understanding of HTML,” she liked having “more freedom to put up my own site. WordPress is relatively unfettered, and I was lucky to have the infrastructure, so I didn’t have to find space on a university server or a commercial site, where we might have been more regulated in what we can post.”

"Year 2000 understanding of HTML"--that's me. Seems it served her well today. I wonder if I should put my hybrid course up on Wordpress instead of NJIT site. It will be MY course, after all. I can put it where I want it, no? Need to think through the pros and cons.

Selfie III

The Association of Internet Researchers wanted to bring scholarship to the selfie phenomenon, and wanted to use the writing of young researchers and/or bloggers who hadn't been published yet, because the work was not considered scholarly.

“There’s not a thing called The Media. I’m part of it.”

Terri Senft of NYU discusses camgirls, slut shaming, and girls' need for self-expression. Then she addresses political and civic engagement. She says pictures of the dead put a human face on issues.

Selfie IV
Concerning digital pedagogy and teaching selfies in the college writing classroom:

National and international news organizations have been reporting on his recent work at the University of Southern California, but unfortunately this coverage has sometimes reinforced generalizations about the supposed superficiality, narcissism, and anti-intellectualism of young people, stereotypes that he had hoped to dispel.

Mark Marino says his students thought that selfies were about narcissistic young women, but instead, he teaches about all kinds of historic and modern modes of self-representation. The assignments he did with selfies, Facebook, and Vine all include critical thinking and reflection. Oh, and his classes did netprovs. Cool. He uses the topic of self-representation as a springboard to talk about privilege and access and inequality.