I am not sure whether it is because it is so easy just to quickly view, evaluate and pin while watching TV or the fact that there is that voyeristic curiosity when you flip through other people's cuttings.
Pinterest is a Web 2.0 pin-board tool. Where as twitter and facebook are predominately text based, pinterest is all about the images linking the ideas. Users can create their own little pinboards and just collect ideas en-mass.
Screen shot of some of my pinboards
Edudemic had a great article on 20 ways in which Libraries are using Pinterest right now. Quite a number of the suggestions are to involve your community in using and refering to your pinterest. But I see it more as a scrapbook for ongoing ideas, than an end product and I would like to clarify why.
The way in which people read and use information has changed. People are bombarded with links, tweets, images, videos all in bite bit of information; information overload. When I flip through pinterest, it doesn't really contribute to my thinking, it is more like an aggregator.
Do we as teacher librarians need to be aware of the bombarding of information that students get? What impact does continually throwing out ideas do to the focus of our classrooms? Just because students can access everything using their smart phone, doesn't mean that they should!
So how do I use Pinterest? I use it to gather ideas, to be used later on for a purpose. For example, I have a pinterest board for library week. I use it as I would a bookmark site to check every year when we do our planning for library week.
The thinking behind this post initally started off as a technical explanation on how to install a pinterest widget onto your blog, but after many drafts, I have decided that it is my online thinking area and when I blog I want to be able to be able to comment critically on an issue and add to the discourse, rather than add more infojunk.
What do you think?
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