I first heard of YikYak earlier in the year when a doctoral
researcher I was doing a project on social media use mentioned it as the “thing
the kool kidz are using now”. At the end of the summer Dr Nick Pearce at Durham
blogged about “YikYak Lecturer” or YYL at Durham who had been using it to
provide assistance to students during the exam resit season.
So, I installed the app on my phone being fairly clueless
about it, I didn’t even realise it was anonymous. And my first thought when I
saw that it was, was “oh God this is going to be an utter car crash”. For the
first couple of weeks I was dipping into it, it was a bit of a messy look into
the world of the undergraduate (this was a week before semester started, and a
week after it started). There were some lovely messages about how excited
people were to be coming back to uni and their mates. An awful lot of young men
were discussing their onanist habits in graphic detail; an awful lot of young
women were moaning that they couldn’t get a boyfriend. When I described this
latter situation to friends whose only experience of university was as a
student, they pointed out that the two groups could solve their mutual problems
with the liberal application of alcohol.
I just dip into YikYak when I’m waiting for my train home.
But as semester has rumbled on it’s actually generally impressed me as a
self-policing community. The horror stories from the US don’t seem to be
happen. Unpleasant Yaks get downvoted (and then disappear) or have rather
wonderfully barbed comments on them fairly swiftly. I’ve definitely not seen
anything that would overly concern me given some of the issues on campus. I’ve posted some anonymous comments as
well – such as suggesting students should see their personal tutors about
problems. I’ve also picked up an inconsistency in the University in the way
different schools interpret a particular attendance regulation which we
would’ve remained blissfully unaware of.
I also posted some Yaks directed at my students asking if
they wanted specific help. To varying degrees of success. I managed this short
exchange based on one:
And my second attempt got ten votes and ended up with a
score of -4. I think the anonymity of YikYak does actually help here, and as
Pat Lockley suggested in a comment on a draft of this post, something we should
explore doing more using ed-tech. Students will always think their question is
a “stupid question” no matter how much we tell them it isn’t. Anonymity allows
that hurdle to be jumped.
My most interesting foray was when I’d delivered a brand new
lecture on my module this semester. I ran out of time, and the content and
delivery seemed to fall flat. I don’t even think I managed to deliver the
learning outcomes I was attempting to. Suffice it to say, I left the lecture
theatre feeling a bit shit. So I Yakked about it. And the response was quite
staggering really. I ended up “famous”:
It really was the peer-support of a student community at its
best. It cheered me up no end at the end of the day.
However, I had a couple of trickier moments. As I mentioned
before on here, I shouldn’t have looked at YikYak after sending that announcement to my students. One
thing I definitely should not have done is check YikYak on the day of my own
module exam. I tried reassuring a few students who were clearly getting
anxious, but in the end it just made me incredibly nervous that my whole exam
was going to go wrong with students leaving the exam hall in floods of tears. Although, again, the anonymity shone through, with a
number of students apologising in advance that they might let me down, which was
very sweet, and something they were very unlikely to do to my face. I really
hope they feel that they haven’t when the marks are released in January.
A more tricky moment came with Yaks regarding a colleague’s
classes. The students named the colleague in their Yaks and it always seemed to
happen when I had the app open. Basically, as a group of 18-19-year-olds would
do, they had realised how to get a rise out of the colleague and were
organising on YikYak to do things in classes. It was nothing really severe, and
in my judgement (a point I return to below) it definitely did not amount of
bullying or harassment. However, given knowledge of YikYak among everyone apart
from students seems to be zero, I thought I should probably do something. In
the end I emailed the colleague’s Director of Teaching and Learning describing
what was happening and left it at that.
So, I don’t think YikYak is going to revolutionise either
the world, or the delivery of higher education, but it is definitely an
interesting world into which to dip your toe. My main reflection is, with the
anonymity, I found myself thinking this is the students’ space, I do not belong
here and should not be here (how I feel when I find myself in the Students’
Union) and also thinking about my online identity a lot – how much do I reveal.
Could I give myself away in the way I interact? Should I give myself away? You
can see that in my discussion with paw in the exchange above.
Yet, YikYak mainly garners negative press, along with
similar apps like Yeti.
It probably is time to “check my privilege” here as a young, white man, as
advised here.
The “joking” about the lecturer I mention above wasn’t about me. I might have been able to laugh it off. I might have been able to reflect and
think “well, maybe I shouldn’t have done X as I probably would have done the
same in the same circumstances.” But the typical Yak where I featured was
this:
(and I had to upvote that one. It would have been rude not
to). The worst I ever got was in one of the exam day exchanges a student said “your module was shite anyway mate” which I could just shrug off as disgruntlement.
But I have the cultural capital to manage such online spaces
well and also the privilege to, largely, be afforded respect in such online
spaces. I’m not entirely sure banning such apps and social media is the answer
to the problems they have amplified. We need to tackle many of the problems –
misogyny, racism, homophobia etc. – at source not necessarily attack the
software. We also need to continue to develop our new ethics of online
behaviour.
