Hey, let's take a selfie: insights of selfie defamiliarisation in the classroom

Purpose Selfie is a popular self-expression platform to visually communicate and represent individual thoughts, beliefs, and creativity. However, not much has been investigated about selifie's pedagogical impact when used as an educational tool. Therefore, the authors seek to explore students' perceptions, emotions, and behaviour of using selfies for a classroom activity. Design/methodology/approach A triangulated qualitative approach using thematic, sentiment, and selfie visual analysis was used to investigate selfie perception, behaviour and creativity on 203 undergraduates. Sentiment analyses (SAs) were conducted using Azure Machine Learning and International Business Machines (IBM) Tone Analyzer (TA) to validate the thematic analysis outcomes, whilst the visual analysis reflected cues of behaviour and creativity portrayed. Findings Respondents indicated positive experiences and reflected selfies as an engaging, effortless, and practical activity that improves classroom dynamics. Emotions such as joy with analytical and confident tones were observed in their responses, further validating these outcomes. Subsequently, the visual cue analysis indicated overall positive emotions reflecting openness towards the experience, yet also reflected gender-based clique tendency with modest use of popular selfie gestures such as the “peace sign” and “chin shelf”. Furthermore, respondents also preferred to mainly manipulate text colours, frames, and colour blocks as a form of creative output. Originality/value The study's findings contribute to the limited studies of using selfies for teaching and learning by offering insights using thematic analysis, SA and visual cue analysis to reflect perception, emotions, and behaviour. Peer review The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-11-2021-0608/