Assignment Title: “Storytelling on Social Media”
Date Published: May, 2024
Author(s): Ashley Beardsley, Western Illinois University (A-Beardsley@wiu.edu)
Course Info/Tags: Upper Level, Face-to-Face, Foodways Research
Course motivation: In my English 388: Writing for the Web course, students research foodways—food’s social, cultural, and political qualities—while honing their digital writing skills. I provide the following course description:
What’s your favorite food? Where does it originate? What is the most popular food on campus? In Illinois? These are just a few of the questions we’ll explore as we learn basic HTML, build websites, and create food-themed digital texts. This course considers what it means to write in a digital environment. You will use and analyze collaborative online platforms and consider topics including social media, blogging, privacy, writing with artificial intelligence (AI), and honing the skills you need to analyze and create content for a specific audience.
Writing for the Web fulfills a requirement for students pursuing our English Education or Professional Writing degree options, and creating accessible digital texts is a primary learning outcome.
Context of Assignment: Storytelling on Social Media is the first project in the upper-level writing course, Writing for the Web: Foodways Research. We start the semester with this project as an overview of social media that moves into a focus on Instagram as an image-driven platform to build audience awareness, introduce user-centered design and creating accessible digital texts, and work toward choosing a semester-long foodways research topic. Students create mock-ups of Instagram posts that go through a peer review process and implement design and accessibility changes before sharing them on Instagram. By incorporating mock-ups, students see how user-centered design is an iterative process.
Reflection: I like to begin the semester with this project because it is a way to introduce students to writing digital content using a platform they’ve likely interacted with before. While not all of my students use Instagram, they have a base-level familiarity with social media or web-based content that we can use to start exploring what accessible digital content looks like and how to analyze the audience, purpose, genre conventions, and situational constraints they’ll need to understand to write content for social media and their hand-coded website (the course’s final project).
The project requires students to create a course-specific Instagram account, optimize their profile, create at least five posts, define key terms, and provide alt text as a project memo submitted in addition to the published posts. The course pre-requisite covers memo writing, so we review the general formatting and requirements, but memos are something my students are used to writing. You could change the memo into a reflection essay or process paper to fit your students’ prior knowledge. Additionally, because alt text on Instagram is only available to those using a screen reader, the memo provides this essential information; however, the memo could be cut from the assignment, and students could post the alt text as the first comment to their post. Providing the alt text here embraces an accessibility-for-all approach to social media that I will implement the next time we use Instagram.
Before introducing the assignment, polling students to see what they already know about alt text and using social media is helpful. Many students use social media regularly, so you can tailor the assignment to fit your classes’ knowledge. For instance, students most likely understand how hashtags work but might be unfamiliar with alt text and how to include it on image-driven social media platforms. I like to conduct this survey on the first day of class so I can adjust the assignment and in-class activities.
