Highlights Video

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Reflection

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Inspired by Heymitch Stevens' Master's project for Stanford's Learning, Design and Technology (LDT) Masters Program, an educational experience created in Instagram @theinterestingproject, I wanted to use Instagram in a similarly novel way. The Instagram houses short, engaging texts and digital media that offers tourists and locals an opportunity to learn about the history and importance of hydroelectric power in Ontario, explore hydroelectricity production as a renewable resource, and to consider and relate personally to these energy sources and their impact on the surrounding natural environment.

 

I choose Instagram as a content sharing vehicle because it is highly visual and lends itself to sharing various micro-bites of information and narratives through text-based, image-based, and video-based media. The Instagram provides participatory opportunities for others to create and share their own information, exploration, and reflection of topics through participation through commenting, sharing in stories, and creating their own media.

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This project was a bit ambitious, and I became so sidetracked with creating the companion pieces, that when it came time to pull everything together for Instagram, I didn't do as well as I had hoped in executing the project as a whole. While I'm proud I experimented with a social media technology I think has educational potential, I had higher expectations for the Instagram portion. However, instead of dwelling on this, I'm taking away the experience of having used Instagram to educate and have a better sense of all the project management pieces that are required to pull it off. I shared some of the tools and process in the Project Creation Tools section of the About page for the project, and I hope that I can return to that to repeat the process and that others may find it useful, as well.