iVoices Student Media Lab was a three-year project (2020-2023) sponsored in part by the Center for University Education and Scholarship at the University of Arizona. Over three semesters, students in classes about social media were taught media skills in workshops led by peers, and then invited to openly license media stories and artifacts they produced for these assignments. The iVoices Collection includes these openly licensed stories and artifacts, licensed CC BY so they are reusable with attribution.

iVoices project abstract: When we teach about social and instructional technologies, we leave out student perspectives on technologies they are immersed in.  Users make sense of technologies personally, ideologically, and culturally, ideally leading to individualized knowledge and literacy.  However, inequitable curricula that ignore students’ distinct histories with technologies threaten not only retention but also students’ identities and self-efficacy.  Scholarship on Hispanic learners finds that students form critical “funds of knowledge” from personal and cultural experiences, knowledge they can share through creating stories.  iVoices channels knowledge shared through students’ stories into new media, curricula, and scholarship, by transforming the large General Education course Social Media and Ourselves into a student-centered think tank and digital media lab supported by a community of scholars.  Data based on students’ development and media creations in iVoices will shed light on how experiences with technologies shape student learning, and illuminate novel technology practices and meaning for new media scholarship.