Social Media in the Classroom: Tips from a Millennial Professor

May 29, 2010 By Leave a Comment
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By Jennifer Edwards, Tarleton State University

As a professor from the millennial generation, I hold social media to a high regard in my undergraduate communication classrooms. To incorporate social media in the “Foundations for Speech Communication”, “Organizational Communication”, and “Interpersonal Communication” courses (averaging 25 students), I combined my efforts to create opportunities for different classes to interact with one another (and the campus) through social media. To reach the students in my online and face-to-face classes, I decided to incorporate Twitter and Youtube as experiential activities.

Twitter Embedded in Blackboard

On our campus, we use Blackboard as a content management system for online and hybrid classes. Recently, I discovered that I could embed widgets (java application) into the main course page. I added my professional twitter account username [name of account] to the widget and this enabled my students to remain abreast of course updates and to have more of a social presence with their professor. In addition, the students had the option to follow me on twitter [@accountname] to ask quick questions and to provide short updates on their daily life. [Read more...]

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Building Personal Brands through Social Media

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By David Kamerer, Loyola University Chicago

Students in my public relations writing class are assigned to write 12 blog posts during the semester. While we use many social media tactics in the class, blogging requires the largest time commitment. Some complain about the assignment.

“What should I write about?” ask others.

My answer is that they should write about their professional passion and to do it well. [Read more...]

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Social Media in the Classroom: Twitter and Journalists

April 29, 2010 By Leave a Comment
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By Dominic Lasorsa, University of Texas at Austin

I have found an approach for incorporating the study of social media into the college curriculum that can be used with courses of different sizes and to study different social media. The project shows students that social media serve different functions for different users with different consequences, that as means of mass communication social media are relevant to journalists’ work, and that scientific methods can be employed to help answer intriguing questions, such as how new technologies affect journalists’ work.

I chose Twitter because journalists have become heavy users and because it is one of the newer online social media. Twitter is a form of “microblogging,” a means of communication in which short (no more than 140-character) messages are sent to other users who have chosen to follow the sender. Twitter “followers” are similar to Facebook “friends.” [Read more...]

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The Teaching of Social Media: A Cross-Curricular Infusion Approach

April 29, 2010 By Leave a Comment
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By George Daniels, University of Alabama

From teaching an introductory course in journalism to leading a graduate-level seminar on the role of mass media in society or facilitating an advanced public relations writing course, social media can be a part of your teaching strategy. As facilitators of professionally-oriented courses of study, our goal is always to produce critical thinkers with a skillset that enables them to be “ready to work” in media environments that require flexible, forward-looking employees. What better way to be “forward-looking” than to see not only how social media have evolved in recent years, but how audience use of these social media is changing the way traditional media operate. Structured around five “core principles” presented as 140-character tweets (like those found on Twitter), this essay reviews teaching approaches by a journalism instructor whose core teaching area is cross-platform/multimedia reporting, but who also teaches a freshman-level introductory course in journalism, basic news reporting as well as a junior/senior-level course in media management for students studying in all areas of mass media.

The subject of social media is one that belongs in virtually every course in a journalism and mass communication curriculum. [Read more...]

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Cross-University Collaboration through Micro-blogging: Introducing Students to Twitter for Promoting Collaborations, Communication and Relationships

March 9, 2010 By Leave a Comment
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By Tricia M. Farwell, Middle Tennessee State University and Richard D. Waters, North Carolina State University

University collaboration with schools, communities and industry has been around for some time. While recently some universities are feeling increased pressure to focus on community partnerships through service learning due to President Obama’s pointing towards service as part of the higher-education agenda (Ashburn, 2010), partnering across universities is still slowly growing in some fields (Fisher, Phelps, & Ellis, 2000). [Read more...]

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