NKA: Instagram

Networked Knowledge Activities, developed by Dennen et al., is a framework for identifying learning-adjacent behaviors on social media platforms. A very interesting concept, if you ask me. As I was reading up on the topic, I received a random notification from Instagram, which sparked an idea: Let's apply NKA to Insta and write a blog post about it! As a disclaimer, I should note that I'm not heavily invested in Instagram, so my understanding of the features/functions likely isn't comprehensive. If I'm off-base, then please feel free to correct me.

There are six learning behaviors that can occur organically on social media: collect, curate, share, broker, negotiate, and construct. Let's apply those to Instagram's affordances.

1. Collect: Easy enough. Instagram has options to bookmark posts and videos that can be organized into collections (if I'm understanding this properly). This makes the collection of information easy to achieve, and learners can bookmark and revisit posts whenever they want. I took a look at my bookmarks and found a ton of recipes/cooking tutorials that I've saved over the years. Some of them are wildly ambitious when you consider the fact that my cooking skills begin and end at boiling water.

2. Curate: Organizing saved content for a purpose and then offering commentary or context. A bit tougher. I suppose that you can create a series of reels that, when packaged together, create a miniature lesson. For instance, creating a themed highlight reel related to cooking a Baked Ziti could be considered curation. Perhaps?

3. Share: Social media is all about sharing. Sharing knowledge can be done in several ways on Instagram, such as reposting, tagging someone in a comment, or adding content to a reel. You can also add your own text over the top of reposts, which can add to the instructional value of whatever you're sharing.  

4. Broker: This is where I start having trouble applying NKA. This involves connecting knowledge between networks/groups. I guess in a literal sense, brokering can occur if you share content from another social media platform on Instagram? Or maybe tagging someone in a post that runs tangential to their typical knowledge realm? I get that it involves bringing useful information from one place to another, but I feel like my understanding conflates brokering with sharing. 

5. Negotiate: This is where people come together to develop a shared understanding or agreement on a topic. In Instagram's case, this dialogue could be in the form of a comment thread where folks explore the topic featured in the post. This allows individuals to co-create knowledge or perspectives that they wouldn't otherwise have. New cooking tips, discussions about techniques, cooking hacks, etc.

6. Construct: At this point, we're making original, brand-new content based on previously gathered/shared info. We're synthesizing! Perhaps after all of the sharing and brokering, the result is a new video or posts that tutorialize something based on the info provided. Maybe once the information has been shared and negotiated, the output is a resource guide on cooking stuff? Perhaps the construction is through combining all of the tips learned in previous content and making a cheat sheet for making a Baked Ziti that is then shared out to a cooking-centric Insta account? 

Can learning happen on Instagram? Sure! I feel like Instagram has more educational potential than meets the eye, as proven through the NKA framework. Yes, I'm not entirely sure if tagging a friend in a reel about stuffed shells counts as negotiating or sharing, but either way, it feels like social media has evolved from surface-level food photography to knowledge epicenters where people can co-create new knowledge, be it Ziti-specific or otherwise.