Studying participatory cultures is much easier than making a participatory culture, much less an effective one that uses connected learning. In a past study, I examined how participatory culture had been garnered through a Discord roleplay server. Using what I had learned from that research, I thought about how crucial social media can be in creating successful Digital Media learning, or DML.
In order to create such a community, we had to remember that members need a goal to work towards, per the idea that challenge is constant. So we started with an itch- something that gets under your skin that you want to solve.
My classmate Julianna, who lives on our university’s campus, complained that the dining hall was closed too early, 7:30, to be exact, and that the other spots around campus weren’t much better.
We started to theorize how we could solve this problem while encouraging learning.
Julianna, another classmate Ian, and I formed a group and started discussing this. We thought that students of the Auraria campus would want to know what their food options beyond just the dining hall were to increase their accessibility to knowledge and learning experiences. We thought that we could influence learning by including descriptions of the history and culture of each food spot within the potential posts that we would make. Before we could implement our idea, we decided to conduct community-based fieldwork with other students on campus.
We asked three students about what they would want to see in a DML that teaches about food around campus. We asked if they wanted to know if the food spot was busy or not, the pricing, how far they would be willing to walk, if they were interested in the culture or history of a spot, if they would be willing to review locations that we posted, and if they would seek out the DML. We found that these students wanted to know all of the information that we suggested except for the culture and history of the food spots, and that they actually would not seek out the DML.
We felt a bit stuck after these interviews because we felt that learning would not exist within our DML if we didn’t include information about culture or history. However, we realized that learning about existing food spots would be learning within itself that could benefit the users of the DML, and that users could be producers of this learning by submitting food spots to us, or creating their own posts. Our shared purpose would be to increase the knowledge that Auraria students had of their food options on campus.
We had another problem. Our participants said that they would not seek out our DML. So, instead of creating a page that people had to navigate to, we decided to bring the DML to them, in the form of Snapchat.
The “CU Denver 2026” is a shared Snapchat story that members of the CU Denver class of 2026 can view and post on- everyone can participate, not just CU Denver staff or school-affiliated organizations. Hundreds of students already follow this story, so we felt that it might be best to post our DML there. This was an example of user-centered prototyping and feedback; we were testing our first draft and wanted to see if it worked.
We knew that our DML should be production-centered, both for us as well as the users. We needed to produce posts about food spots, and users should be able to produce this, as well. We decided to incorporate a hashtag in our post so that other people could post using our hashtag- but Snapchat does not incorporate working hashtags into their service.
To increase potential feedback, we included a slide that asked for comments on our contribution to the story.
We saw a little success. Within a few minutes, over 40 people saw our story and 3 people screenshotted the slide in which we presented a food truck on campus. Screenshotting is an example of participation on Snapchat, because it shows the uploader that their content was worth keeping. Despite this, no one messaged us to give us feedback. We felt that this was indicative that Snapchat may not be the right platform for our DML.
Instead, we turned our attention to Instagram. We made an Instagram account for the DML titled “@aurariafoodspots.” We thought that it would increase the participation of the audience as producers because they could make public comments, actually be able to use the hashtag, tag us, and post us on their stories. This would also allow us to be more openly-networked, since, opposed to Snapchat, posts were permanent and more easily accessible to users.
We followed multiple accounts affiliated with the three schools on campus. Before posting anything, we gained followers that included students and campus accounts.
We then made a post that centered around the trucks we visited, and we tagged them. They commented, followed us, and posted us on their story.
We also had a student comment on our post that they loved the Boba truck that we featured. This practically functioned as a review of the truck, which we had asked the original fieldwork participants about. Since this student had solicited the food truck and gave a review, other users may see that and learn about whether they want to visit that truck. In an estranged way, this learning happens by doing, but someone else is doing it. Hopefully, if more people produce comments about their experiences, more people will partake in the “doing” aspect.
Afterwards, we created a poll on our story to see what specific information people wanted in our posts. We found that most people wanted to know the prices of food spots, as well as their distance. If we were to continue the DML, we would include this information in our posts.
Julianna also created a Google Sites website for permanent restaurants on campus, which we have linked in our bio on Instagram so that students can access that resource. This is an example of transmedia navigation, in that users can access different sites to access more knowledge.
It is clear that the Instagram that we created for our DML saw more interaction than the posts we made on Snapchat. This indicates that, while interviews are valuable in creating a successful DML, the actual results in response to the prototypes can more clearly show what user behaviors will be.
If we were to continue the DML, there are multiple things we could do to make it more effective. We could encourage users to interact with each other by asking them icebreaker questions on our posts, such as “Have you ever worked for a place like this?” or “Did you like this type of food the first time you tried it? Has your opinion changed?” This would help to foster engagement and self-expression, because users could not only share their own experiences but also reply to others’ experiences. The DML also lacks engagement with academically-oriented interests. We had hoped this would come about from sharing the history and culture of the food spots, but participants told us that they didn’t want that. Still, as per the DML’s failure on Snapchat, we could test the concept in a prototype and see if it works.
Works Cited
Lankshear, C., & Knobel, M. (2011). New Literacies: Everyday Practices and Social Learning (Third ed.). Berkshire, England: Open University Press.
Mathews, James, and Jeremiah Holden. Mobile Media Learning — Remi Kalir. 2011, remikalir.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Mathews-Holden-2012.pdf./