Four Authors/Five Books: A Reading Assignment for Media Educators and Scholars

July 7, 2010 By Leave a Comment
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Four Authors/Five Books

By Cindy Royal, Assistant Professor,
Texas State University in San Marcos

The AEJMC conference in Boston offered many of the benefits I always enjoy and appreciate at the annual gathering: seeing old friends, networking with colleagues, meeting people with whom I have been communicating online and learning about research and teaching trends. But, the conference took a different tone this outing, as there was much discussion (both online and offline, in the sessions and in the hallways) of journalism professors being out of touch with the realities of online media and the digital economy (see Guy Berger’s MediaShift post “Two Recent J-Education Conferences Show Resistance to Change”). Criticisms included: questions and issues being addressed in sessions were outdated; research topics were tedious and mired in minutia; some social media applications, like Twitter, were viewed with disdain and condescension; and a general lack of understanding of the challenges and needs of the industries we support. As a profession, we have many big questions to answer, at such a critical time, that it has to be our responsibility as educators to assist in developing innovative solutions and drive the conversation.

It is exceedingly important that journalism as an educational and scholarly discipline embraces the new media environment and helps lead our graduates to enter their chosen fields with a spirit of innovation and the ability to influence direction. We often get wrapped up in the skills we teach. Should students learn HTML, video editing, Flash? Should they use Facebook, Twitter, YouTube? [Read more...]

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Successful Use of Various Social Media In A Class

July 3, 2010 By Leave a Comment
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By Ronald A. Yaros, University of Maryland

Summary Of A “Hybrid” Course Devoted to Technology and Social Media

This course, with 36 undergraduates, was one of twenty-five new interdisciplinary courses approved by my institution to address “new problems” facing society and to experiment with new teaching and learning strategies. The goals of the class are to use and evaluate various social media in the contexts of information production, sharing, consumption, teaching, and learning. Since the course is open to all majors, one of my goals as a journalism professor is to tap a diverse group of students to gain a better understanding of how digital information and social media are utilized in different disciplines. This “hybrid” course combines class meetings with the use of more than ten different social media tools during the 12-week semester. Some tools take the place of more traditional teaching methods such as papers and written exams. [Read more...]

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Widgets and Wikis for the Web 2.0 Journo

June 29, 2010 By Leave a Comment
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By Allissa Richardson, Morgan State University

On the first day of class, my students set up their “e-newsrooms.” The technology-shy students usually groan—then ask me what Facebook, Scribd, Twitter and WordPress have to do with being a journalist. I understand AEJMC begs this question too. Please allow me to share how my affinity for social media in the classroom began and evolved.

FACEBOOK’S SLIPPERY SLOPE

At some point in the Spring 2009 semester, I realized my students were not accessing Blackboard to fetch assignments or to view the assigned readings I had suggested in class. Students were coming to class unprepared and—even worse!—trying to pretend that they had done their homework. I began to think there must be a better way to reach them. [Read more...]

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Incorporating Social Media in the Classroom: A Few Examples and An Overview

June 29, 2010 By 1 Comment
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By Leslie-Jean Thornton, Arizona State University

I’ve seen so many benefits from using social media in my classes that I have no wish to teach without such tools, no matter the subject. They enhance my ability to teach skills in real-world situations while allowing the growth of community within and without the group.

Twitter is my current multi-tasking favorite device, but content-management systems (such as WordPress, Tumblr, Posterous and the like) are almost as versatile. In my classes, they’re backed by our use of individual services that include Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, Google Docs, Delicious, Twitpic, Google and Yahoo maps, various RSS readers, Skype, and SEO/audience analyzers. I haven’t quite worked out the particulars yet, but I intend to use Foursquare (and its mash-up companion, Fourwhere) as both a model and tool in classes this fall. It plays on an interesting reward dynamic that appears to be growing in popularity in the marketplace. It’s worthy of study for that reason alone, but I’m thinking along craftier lines. Perhaps we’ll develop an in-class badge system… [Read more...]

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Teaching Research Methods with Social Media Tools

June 15, 2010 By Leave a Comment
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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...]

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Using Social Media to Develop Students’ Critical Thinking Skills

May 29, 2010 By Leave a Comment
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By Wanda Reyes, Sam Houston State University

I use YouTube and Facebook in Principles of Public Relations to help my students develop critical thinking skills. This course introduces students to theories and their applications in public relations. The main goal is to have students learn to analyze and critically evaluate ideas, arguments, and point of views related to the public relations practice.

Since public relations practitioners operate under a wide range of environmental influences, there are no cookie cutters in the public relations practice (Guth & March, 2005). Communication strategies or programs that may work in one situation, may not work in another. Hence, public relations practitioners must think critically before making decisions. To encourage my students to develop critical thinking skills so they can apply course content to public relations situations, I designed different assignments and exercises that use both traditional and social media. [Read more...]

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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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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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Extreme Social Media

March 6, 2010 By Leave a Comment
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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...]

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