Classroom Activity: Social Media Platform Analysis
Assignment Title: Social Media Platform Analysis
Author: Emily Gillo, University of Memphis, (epsmith2@memphis.edu)
Course Motivation: This course is centered around critical digital literacy and aims to give students the opportunity to learn, experiment, and apply principles of technical writing and rhetoric to workplace communication, public online writing, and civic engagement. The social media unit has a particular emphasis on ethics, the digital footprint, and content moderation.
Context of Use: This assignment is the culminating project for a course module on online content creation and social media ethics. Students will compose a critical analysis that demonstrates rhetorical skill, is visually engaging, and is inclusive and accessible to a wide audience.
Instructor Reflection:
What do you like about this activity?
This activity encompasses so many important topics in technical communication. There is an initial critical rhetorical analysis component where students research their chosen social media platform’s user agreements that gives students the chance to exercise rhetorical skills and to reflect on their own personal online behavior. Another element of this project is visual rhetoric which allows students to take the visual rhetoric and digital design topics they read about and put them into practical application. A third element of this project is that it stresses the importance of design justice – avoiding deceptive design and employing universal design..
What scaffolding/preparation needs to happen?
The first week of the unit asks students to read about and reflect on the ethics of social media content moderation and algorithms. The second week has students read about and reflect on how social media platforms can be used to spread awareness and serve as a place for public protest. The third week focuses on visual rhetoric and inclusive design basics to help them start thinking about the most appropriate genre for their multimodal draft, and the fourth week focuses on SEO writing, the differences between universal design, accessibility, and inclusive design, and provides them with an in-depth universal design toolkit to help them finish the final draft that is both multimodal and fully accessible.
