Students as pinners: A multimodal analysis of a course activity involving curation on a social networking site

This study examined how Pinterest, a multimodal social networking site, was used as a tool in a graduate course to allow students to explore interesting language use in everyday life for a class assignment. The findings indicated that pinners' collection on the Pinterest board celebrated various uses of language and multimodal signifiers as different examples of language use. Thus, pins revealed pinners' interpretation of what made particular instances of language use “psycholinguistic examples.” The affordances of the Pinterest board as a public site allowed pinners to engage in on-going communication with their fellow pinners and the greater Internet public. Both images and accompanying messages revealed pinners' intentions to express their thoughts about noteworthy language use and to invite their audience to pay attention to what they had shared. The Pinterest activity as digital curation created a participatory culture that encouraged students' collaboration and informal learning.