5 Interview with David Squires: Social Media Texts
5 Interview with David Squires: Social Media Texts
David Squires and visiting assistant professor at Washington State University
David Squires was a visiting assistant professor teaching in Washington State University’s Digital Technology & Culture[1] program and works at the Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation.[2] In fall 2016, he had students in his Intro to Digital Technology & Culture course create two OER texts on social media, The Social Construction of Media: Social Media, Culture and Everyday Life[3] and Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Social Media (but Were Too Afraid to Ask).[4] We interviewed David about his experience.
Tell us about the project:
The end product is meant to be a prototype of a OER textbook on social media. There are lots of marketing textbooks on social media, but nothing quite like a cultural studies textbook, so that was the goal: a model for what a social media textbook could look like.
How did the project unfold?
We dedicated about six weeks to the whole thing. First we read, wrote, and discussed copyright, Creative Commons, and open access publishing. Then the students started researching topics and writing. Finally, they put the pieces together as a Scalar[5] book.
What role did students play in the project?
My students did most everything, start to finish. I played the role of project manager but tried to let them do as much of the work as possible. They rose to the occasion, tackling research, writing, layout and design—they even conceptualized the subject areas and structure of the project. At the end, they presented their work in public, for the beginning of Open Access Week. That gave them a sense of a hard deadline that wasn’t just me saying due date! It really was a moment in time that required a certain level of achievement. I’m glad to report that each chapter-group met the challenge, although a few individual students were not able to present.
How did you leverage the project to achieve the learning objectives for the class?
Over the past year, The DTC program at WSU has worked to clarify course objectives for “Intro to Digital Technology & Culture.” Here’s the outcome:
- Perform humanistic inquiry in combination with computational methods.
- Assess information and sources.
- Engage in collaborative and project-based learning.
- Practice creative design and analysis of digital media.
This project furthers each of these objectives:
- Students learn digital research tools and a new web publishing platform, Scalar.
- Students learn to assess sources as they research their specific chapters, especially as they pull web materials to feature in their book. A big part of this project was identifying valid primary and secondary sources, and knowing which were which.
- They created this project as a class, and each chapter had a group of three students contributing.
- The primary sources required critical analysis, while the Scalar platform allowed students to practice design and layout as part