Pitt-Johnstown students in a Writing for Digital Media course were assigned to take over social media for class.

According to senior Ashley Grego, the class goal was to learn outsourcing.

“The goal of our assignment was to create original memes (concepts, beliefs or practices) using crowdsourcing and collaborating with classmates’ images and texts, so we would learn the value of sharing and outsourcing,” Grego said.

The tag ‘#UPJRemix’ was used frequently in the students’ Twitter posts.

According to Grego, Twitter was chosen to be used because it is one of the biggest social media platforms right now.

“We used Twitter because it is the most hashtag-friendly social media platform right now,” Grego said.

One of the other biggest social media platforms is a photo-sharing platform: Instagram.

According to Grego, Twitter was a better choice because they had to share texts and images separately.

“However, I think,  because we made our memes, we had to post texts and images separately, the text may not have been as easy to post on Instagram unless it was a caption with a photo, or it was just a photo.

“Using Twitter obviously solved this problem because Twitter lets you post both text and images without text.”

The assignment taught students how to collaborate, which was a goal for them to accomplish.

According to Grego, she said she thinks the assignment taught them the creative values of sharing.

“As a class, I think it opened our eyes to the creative value of collaborating with others, even if the material somebody is supplied to collaborate with is dependent of another’s texts and images that may have been selected and posted at random,” Grego said.

“I also think we learned how creative one could get with simply just photos on text, or even photos on photos.”

According to senior Eric Bimmeier, the assignment was to essentially steal types of media and create a new mash up, or remix content into new media.

“The goal was to create something new by taking other media,” Bimmeier said.

Along with the social media platform of Twitter, the tag of ‘UPJRemix’ showed up on the social media platform of Instagram as well.

According to Bimmeier, he used the tag on the photo platform of Instagram.