Blogging — AEJMC Hot Topics

Teaching Research Methods with Social Media Tools

June 15, 2010 By AEJMC Leave a Comment

By Kelli Burns, University of South Florida

Today’s tech-savvy student generation is actively participating in social networking and other online communities, so most students not only understand how to use Web 2.0 teaching tools, they thrive in the environment when Web communication solutions are integrated in the classroom.—K. Driscoll, 2007, p. 10

Social media tools can enrich a research methods class by providing students with a way to collect data, share research, and monitor online conversations. At the beginning of the course, students create their own blogs using WordPress and then throughout the course, use the blogs to post reports, photos, videos, and podcasts. The five social media assignments that have been assigned in this course are described below. These assignments include (1) a social media monitoring project which asks students to monitor social media sites for conversations about a client; (2) an ethnography project where students collect data through photographs that are posted to a photo-sharing site; (3) an interview project where student create MP3s of their interviews and upload them to their blogs as podcasts; (4) a focus group blog project where students collect data on a blog over several days; and (5) a survey project requiring students to create a video and an online survey. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Features Tagged With: AEJMC, Blogging, Facebook, Flickr, Google, Kelli Burns, Myspace, Research, Social Media, Social Media in the Classroom, Twitter, University of South Florida, YouTube

How To Integrate Social Networks And Blogs Into Traditional Curriculums

May 29, 2010 By AEJMC 1 Comment

By Keith Quesenberry, Temple University

Introduction

Social Media is growing and changing the way we live, the way we do business and the way we connect. The latest numbers indicate that in December 2009 the social network Facebook surpassed 100 million active users in the U.S. and over 350 million worldwide (Smith, 2010). Blogs are, well, everywhere. The latest number I could find was in 2008 when the Blog Herald reported that there were roughly 200 million blogs (Helmond, 2008). Since then it seems people have given up counting. Even CEOs are blogging. Sun Microsystems CEO Blog gets 400,000 hits a month (Balwani, 2009). Bloggers are now legitimate media gaining access to and asking questions of the President at Whitehouse press conferences (Baker, 2009). And Facebook has become large enough and influential enough to draw fire from U.S Senators over its privacy settings (Patel, 2010).

Social media is here to stay and will only further infiltrate how we socialize, conduct business and learn. But how do we integrate emerging Web 2.0 technologies into an established, traditional university curriculum? [Read more...]

Filed Under: Features Tagged With: AEJMC, Blackboard, Blogging, Buddypress, Facebook, Keith Quesenberry, Ning, Social Media, Social Media in the Classroom, Social Networking, Temple University, Wordpress

Extreme Social Media

March 6, 2010 By AEJMC Leave a Comment

By Brad King, Assistant Professor, Ball State University

On Thursday Oct 15, Hallmark Homes Inc., a home builder in the Muncie, Jnd. area, approached the Ball State University Department of Journalism with an interesting request: assemble three teams of students for a project with ABC’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, a popular television program through which a family receives a new house in seven days. The show would be coming to Bunker Hill, about 70 miles north of the university.

Derek Wilder, Hallmark’s chief executive officer, wanted to make sure that the thousands of volunteers, builders and sponsors — many of whom don’t receive recognition on the television program — had the opportunity to have their stories told. The catch for the team, though, was that the show won’t air until sometime in January, which meant we had to build not only the network, but the media outreach as well. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Features Tagged With: Blogging, Brad King, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, Facebook, Flickr, Google, Social Media, Tech Meme, TV, Twitter, YouTube

AEJMC Supports Free Flow of Information Act

October 7, 2009 By AEJMC Leave a Comment

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE | The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) joins the dozens of news organizations supporting the Free Flow of Information Act (FFIA), a federal shield law that passed the House and is now under debate in the Senate. A key component of the bill is how a journalist will be defined. The current definition, attached to the bill as an amendment, is too restrictive.

The definition of those who gather and disseminate news and information of public interest should not be predicated on an individual’s employment, but instead on an individual’s journalistic practice. [Read more...]

Filed Under: PAC Tagged With: AEJMC, Blogging, Carol Pardun, Free Flow of Information Act, Journalism, PAC