Pinterest, Gender, and Platform Selection

Last week, I had the pleasure of guest teaching in a digital humanities graduate course in the French department. The course is team-taught by Lynn Ramey and Holly Tucker of the French department and Todd Hughes of the Center for Second Language Studies. They’ve been exploring a variety of topics in the digital humanities this spring: intellectual property, professional digital identities, crowdsourcing, open access publishing, and digital tools such as ArcGIS, TEI, Omeka, Diigo, and WordPress. They asked me to visit the class and help them think about ways to use digital tools in their teaching, and I was happy to do so. I shared some thoughts on social pedagogies, including course blogs, social bookmarking, and backchannels, and we had a very lively discussion. The Prezi I used is available here, and Lynn was kind enough to post some photos of the ideas generated by the group.

One of the aspects of “digital pedagogies” we discussed that I found particularly interesting was the question of platform selection. I talked about giving my statistics students the choice between using Diigo and Pinterest this spring for their social bookmarking assignments. I have about 70 students in the course, and most of them went with Diigo. Only about eight students decided to use Pinterest. Why did most of my students choose Diigo? Since I haven’t asked them (yet), I’ll float a couple of hypotheses here, both predicated on the assumption that most of my students weren’t using either service.

Hypothesis 1: Students choosing Diigo over Pinterest selected the service that seemed more academic. Why might Diigo seem to be more academic in nature than Pinterest? There’s the fact that Pinterest is full of photos, and academic technology tools usually aren’t that visually dynamic. And there’s the impression that Pinterest is for non-academic uses. For example, Pinterest’s About page suggests that “people use pinboards to plan their weddings, decorate their homes, and organize their favorite recipes,” and most of the popular press Pinterest receives supports the idea that people use Pinterest for personal hobbies and interests.

Hypothesis 2: Pinterest has the reputation for being a site mainly for women. Most of my engineering students are men, so they opted for the less gendered option, Diigo. Pinterest’s gendered reputation is not undeserved, since women account for 80% of users by some accounts. And wedding planning, home decor, and recipes (those activities suggested on the Pinterest About page) are certainly gendered activities in the US. I don’t see Pinterest as an inherently gendered platform–it’s just an image-based social bookmarking service. When I log on to Pinterest, I see some recipes and fashion pins, but I also see a fair amount of photography, data visualization, and generally geeky pins:

What you see on Pinterest depends entirely on whom you follow. That said, there must be some reason why 80% of Pinterest users are women, and given that many perceive the site as geared toward women, it’s perhaps understandable that my male engineering students opted for Diigo.

I can see both of those hypotheses playing out in other contexts in which students get to choose tools or platforms for use in their coursework. If students perceive a particular service as non-academic or geared for some demographic to which they don’t belong, they may be less likely to adopt it for academic use. For instance, could I persuade my students to use StumbleUpon as part of a course? I think many students who use StumbleUpon see it as a way to waste time, not learn about topics of academic interest, so that might be a hard sell. Some of my students might perceive Twitter as a platform for following celebrities and comedians; others might see it useful professionally, but only for those out of college. Either way, they might be hesitant to jump into Twitter as part of a class backchannel.

The two hypotheses above both assumed that my students weren’t already using either Pinterest or Diigo. However, it’s clear to me that some of the students who chose Pinterest were already Pinterest users. That observation leads me to two more hypotheses:

Hypothesis 3: Asking students to use a tool or platform they already use can mean less of a technological learning curve for them. This seems like a pretty safe assumption. I didn’t need to teach my Pinterest-using students how to use Pinterest. If I asked my students to use Facebook for my course, I feel that I could safely assume some basic facility with the platform. This isn’t a reason to rule out the use of other tools, but (a) it does mean you might save some time and effort by adopting tools that students already use and (b) if you go in some other direction, you might select a tool that has an interface similar to tools students already know. For instance, I can see using Yammer as a social network for a class since the Yammer interface is intuitive for someone used to using Facebook.

Hypothesis 4: Asking students to use a tool or platform they already use can mean navigating personal / professional boundaries. A couple of years ago, the question faculty often asked about Facebook was whether or not they should “friend” their students. That’s not as much of a live question these days: Most instructors make it a practice not to send a friend request to a student, although many will accept a friend request sent by a student. However, if students start leaving Facebook behind for other social networks like Pinterest, Spotify, Instagram, or even Twitter, the “to friend or not to friend” question will travel with them. I’ve chosen not to follow my students on Pinterest or Twitter, even though I know several of them use Pinterest and a couple of them follow me on Twitter. Will I follow them after they’ve graduated, a policy that many high school teachers use in regard to Facebook friending? Perhaps.

What do you think? Do you buy these hypotheses? Are there other factors you consider when selecting a digital tool or platform for use in your courses?

6 Responses to "Pinterest, Gender, and Platform Selection"

Andrew says:

April 13, 2012 at 3:14 pm

How much time do your students put into the choice of things with little to differentiate them on the surface? A couple of thoughts:

1. Primacy effect

When making choices from a list, people tend to use the first item as the standard by which to compare others. In your assignment you uniformly mention Diigo first.

Random thought: Wikipedia describes primacy alongside recency (ie choosing last option) as part of “serial position effect”, and I came across saw a study describing this for website link clicking. Could this confound analysis of clicker question?

2. Perception of advantages

Given limited information, choosers will amplify the weight of what they know. Most of your explanation of the tasks implicitly emphasises sharing aspects, not least the ‘social’ in the module title. Then you tell them Diigo is better for sharing whereas Pinterest is better for images …

3. Diigo simply sounds cooler than Pinterest (to me)

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Rudy says:

April 18, 2012 at 6:04 pm

I’m finding this a little baffling.

You gave your statistics class a choice between a bookmarking service with mark-up capabilities, which can be used on any internet source in the world, and one which can only pin images? And then you are wondering why they choice the flexible, dynamic, markable one?

And when you wonder why they chose what they chose, you fail to ponder the functionality of the tools for the task? I’m curious why you chose those two tools? Was functionality a consideration? Granted, you haven’t shared any details about the assignment, so it’s all guesswork. But could they have done the assignment on Pinterest?

I’ll be interested to hear what your students report. I’d guess many of them might have decided to give Pinterest a try, and went to Diigo in frustration.

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Derek Bruff says:

April 18, 2012 at 6:35 pm

Thanks for the comment, Rudy. Your tone strikes me a bit antagonistic, but perhaps I’m misreading it. I did indeed consider functionality of the two platforms, but I didn’t address that in this post because I don’t think it’s a big factor in this case.

It’s true that Diigo has a greater range of functionality than Pinterest, but for the purposes of the social bookmarking assignments in this class (all of which are available on the course blog), the extra functionality provided by Diigo wasn’t needed, with one exception (see below) that perhaps affected student selection. I wanted the students to be able to save bookmarks, see each other’s bookmarks, “like” bookmarks, and comment on bookmarks, all functions provided by both Diigo and Pinterest.

The exception is the nature of bookmarks that each platform permits. It’s not true that Pinterest only allows one to bookmark images. Rather, one can bookmark any Web page that includes an image of a certain size. This means that some pages (those with no images or only very small images) aren’t able to be “pinned,” but most pages are.

Pinterest’s restriction on what can be bookmarked does give the edge in functionality to Diigo, but it’s worth noting that two of the six bookmarking assignments specifically asked students to find images (general data visualizations in one case, infographics in particular in the other). For bookmarking images, Pinterest gets the edge over Diigo, at least in terms of usability, since Pinterest actually displays thumbnails of the images. Diigo merely displays a link to the image.

It’s the usability factor that makes Pinterest easier (and one might argue, more fun) to use than Diigo. Diigo may have more flexibility (especially in terms of marking up saved content), but Pinterest does a better job, I think, with aesthetics and social features. Moreover, I know that some of my students were already using Pinterest, but I haven’t seen evidence that any of my students were already using Diigo. I think it’s possible that students will choose a platform they already know, even when a different platform might offer somewhat more functionality.

I think it’s also possible that when it comes to frustration with a particular platform, poor usability can be a bigger problem than lack of functionality, at least for some users. I’m not saying that Diigo is hard to use, just that Pinterest is, in some ways, easier to use.

Earlier today I asked my students on an end-of-semester, anonymous survey why they chose the platform they chose. After I’ve had a chance to sort through their responses, I’ll post an update here on the blog.

Thanks again for your comment. I hope my additional comments have provided some useful context for the question of functionality.

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Derek Bruff says:

April 18, 2012 at 6:40 pm

Thanks for the comment, Andrew. One extra bit of context: When I discussed the platform options in class, I emphasized that some of the social bookmarking assignments would require students to find and share images (data visualizations), and that Pinterest is a really great tool for working with images. That was my “pitch” for using Pinterest over Diigo, for what it’s worth. That pitch is not, however, represented in the blog post about the social bookmarking assignment, as you note.

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Rudy says:

April 18, 2012 at 7:37 pm

Derek, thanks. Sorry if antagonism came through, my first response was pretty strong, and I tried to wash all that out; it sounds like I missed some. (I really don’t see the two tools as alike, so I was curious how you came to think of them as options for a single assignment)

I came across this blog because of the focus on Pinterest, which I am doing a lot of work with currently. One thing I have found is that the image requirement is actually a severely limiting factor. It’s not a small thing. Many of the ways we were going to use Pinterest at my place of work have had to be scrapped because the content was not very likely to have images. The online universe is actually more texty than one might guess 🙂

Looking forward to hearing the student’s thoughts!

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Derek Bruff says:

April 18, 2012 at 10:48 pm

No worries, Rudy. Glad to know the antagonism wasn’t intended.

Your point about the limitations of Pinterest leads me to consider two different kinds of social bookmarking work in which students might be asked to engage. Type A: Bookmark really great sources on a particular topic, and lots of them. Type B: Find one example for a particular topic.

Type A requires a social bookmarking tool that accepts all sources, because you don’t want a student to leave out an important source just because s/he can’t bookmark it on the chosen platform. Type B, however, does not require such a robust social bookmarking tool. A given student just needs to find *one* Web page worth bookmarking that can be bookmarked by the chosen platform.

I see from your blog that you’re a librarian. It makes sense to me that an assignment of Type A might be more useful for the teaching that you do. In my case, a Type B assignment was sufficient, which lowered the bar for tool functionality. If I had asked my students to assemble an annotated bibliography on, say, data visualization (a Type A assignment), then Pinterest wouldn’t have been up to the task, whereas Diigo would.

Thanks again for your comments.

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