Pinterest Has Done It Again.

If you flip on through the recent posts on this blog you will quickly learn that as a class we are working on an ebook and we are currently branching out into social research to inform our topic of digital literacy.

I decided to search through Pinterest because I could see from my classmate's posts that no one had found anything there yet. I was pleasantly surprised with what I found.

Pinterest is user generated. Individuals create pins that link somewhere else, like a blog or an article. The pins can be collected and curated onto a board. The reason that this site proved to be helpful in my research is that I found that there were SO many pins that linked to resources that could be helpful for our project. These resources proved to be neat because they were a combination of more scholarly articles and some less formal commentary on our subjects.

Here's an example of the cover for a pin I found that relates to my subject of online privacy. I love infographs and something like this could be a neat image in my chapter.

I also found pins to help with my subject of eLending (renting ebooks). There were copious amounts of pins to help users know how to rent ebooks and what books are available.

In my research I found that there is a ton of dialogue on Pinterest about online reading as it relates to Education. I believe this is because many Pinterest users are teachers, students, or home-teaching mothers. It reinforced my opinion that we need to make sure that we focus on this adequately. I found a wide variety of pins on this subject, from links to sites that legal free ebook links to step by step guides to using Kindle as a educational resource.  Here are some links to resources that I found that related to this. Here and here and here.

This experiment helped me to see just how many people out there really do have a stake in our project. With each pin I found there were pages and pages of "related pins" that were created by users. I think Pinterest will be a valuable resource for us to find both information and stakeholders.