Tips & Tricks
There are a few considerations to be aware of when assigning these projects to students.
Technical:
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Private accounts: for the Collective Assignment using Instagram, accounts must be public for photos to be visible to anyone who wants to view the class hashtag. One way to get around this is to create a shared class Instagram account that is public by default.
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Some students may not use Instagram: the goal is to assess simultaneity so you can make the assignment platform-agnostic if you'd like, but then you must know where the students are posting their photos. Ideally everyone would engage with the same platform, but this assignment could technically be done entirely through email.
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Access to technology: depending on the classroom, not all students may have access to a camera. If available, talk to the library about lending out equipment for students who need it.
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Aggregating the feed: in our specific example we collected the photos using the Social Media Stream tool within the Wix website building platform to crawl Instagram for any picture with our chosen hashtag. There are many different tools and apps for accomplishing this goal depending on where/how you will be collecting photos.
Pedagogical:
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The assignment works best when simultaneity is as specific as possible. If you can pick an exact time (e.g. we chose 10/11, at 12:13pm), this is most easily remembered and brings the pictures as near as possible to simultaneity. Even if all pictures are from the same hour (e.g. 3-4pm) this will have a better chance of showing the effects of Empty Homogenous Time (e.g. what does the campus look like in the mid-afternoon? Are there shared activities? Are there people in the same location without knowing each other) than when spread out over an entire day.