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The Mass Comm Intro Class: What Worked, What We Learned

14 Dec

It’s the end of my first attempt to dramatically change the way I teach the introductory mass communication class at Fresno State and, as I did mid-semester, I thought I’d blog a bit about how well this new approach played out.

Students’ responses at the end of the semester to our use of popular nonfiction in lieu of a traditional textbook were generally positive. Though I’m rotating out a couple of the books we used in favor of more reader-friendly and updated titles for the spring semester, the selections I used this fall were well-received. Some commented that they enjoyed the variety of perspectives and examples in the books, which was gratifying. Personally, I also found the books much more stimulating to read and teach, and I’m looking forward to reading my three new selections over the holidays so I’m ready for the spring semester.

My holiday reading pile.

I also tried out some new strategies for managing and engaging this large class of 116 students. There are no discussion sections for the course, so it was important to me both to provide many opportunities for small-group and whole-class discussion and to help students connect with others and build support systems within the class. I set up two grouping systems: “blocks” of ~20 students, named by colors; and “teams” of 4-6 students, which were numbered. (The whole syllabus is here.) Though it took a while to get everyone used to the nomenclature, I think it was really helpful to have the students immediately grouped into networks with others. After 4-5 quick iClicker reading review questions, every class session also began with a 10-minute team discussion period, during which students completed a response form that I collected and immediately used in an initial question-and-answer period to launch the day’s discussion.

Interestingly, in studying my grade breakdown for the semester, it looks like two trends occurred. (I didn’t get too quantitative on this, so these are just impressions.) First, the teams that bonded – who I could see really interacting well in class – seem to have obtained higher grades individually. Of course, this has to partly be due to their better cooperation for the few group assignments, but I would like to think it’s at least partly because they could rely upon each other for help and clarification of course material and requirements.

Second, I also think that I probably had a much lower rate of attrition this semester than I did last semester, notable especially in a fall semester when many first-semester new students in this general education course may vanish. I appear to have fewer Fs due to student disappearances (and fewer Fs overall) this semester. Again, I’d like to think that’s because the teams held each other accountable to some degree – and simply were just there every day as familiar faces for students who might otherwise become lost and disconnected in a big class. I’m sure there were other factors – maybe they liked nonfiction better? maybe some of the new assignments were also easier? – but perhaps there’s something more behind that difference in failures.

Finally, I’d like to share the students’ responses to the final exam’s extra credit question, which asked them to identify a concept or topic from the class that they thought they’d remember five years from now and explain why. Here’s a breakdown of the 84 responses (why 32 students didn’t do the extra credit, I’ll never understand!):

  • Selective media exposure/biased assimilation/filtering: 12 (True Enough brought this home)
  • Media literacy and its overall importance: 11
  • The realities of celebrity/rethinking our connections to celebrity: 11 (the students loved Fame Junkies!)
  • Analyzing ads/awareness of advertising and marketing strategies: 9
  • The role of PR and video news releases in journalism: 5 (we watched some of Toxic Sludge is Good for You)
  • Media fragmentation/niche audiences: 4
  • Power of media to define/shape reality: 4
  • Mean world syndrome and cultivation theory: 3
  • Growth of technology and communication methods/devices: 3
  • Decline of print media: 3
  • Narcissism of youth and possible media role in encouraging: 2 (from Fame Junkies again, and we did this in class)
  • How Wikipedia works: 2
  • Growth and power of social media: 2
  • Social media and “slacktivism“: 2
  • Third person effect: 2
  • Lack of world news coverage in the U.S./closure of foreign news bureaus: 2 (this made an impact)
  • Photo manipulation and ethics: 2 (both were female students)
  • Media consolidation/role of conglomerates: 1
  • Importance of failure in media industries and in life: 1 (Clay Shirky’s discussion of “failure is free” in Here Comes Everybody)
  • How we make choices: 1 (we watched Sheena Iyengar’s TED talk on this)
  • TED talks are cool: 1 (we did use a few others in class too!)
  • Role of media regulation: 1
  • Young people don’t know about the world, news, etc.: 1
  • Comedians can be informative: 1 (we used a lot of Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert clips too)

Looking at this list now, I’m pretty pleased with it. Unfortunately, some of the structural media issues didn’t quite stick with the students (or weren’t as appealing to use for the question). Still, I am surprised by how many remained interested in and concerned about their own selective tendencies with regard to their media exposure, and about how those preferences would shape their lives, politics, and so on. If I’ve managed to make them more aware of their choices and their effects, then I’m content. And, just as I see my students begin to question and analyze their own choices, so too should I continue to do the same – and that’s how we all learn from each other.

I may write more about this class and my plans for next time around when I have time and a bit more distance from the semester. In the meantime, thanks, MCJ 1, for a great semester!

Personal Growth and Social Networking Identities

1 Nov
Twitter me this 119/365

What are you doing, and who are you? Photo by Sasha Wolff on Flickr.

My large introductory media studies class often takes unexpected turns. With 120 students of widely varying backgrounds and interests, I am frequently surprised (and pleased) by new insights, interdisciplinary connections, and individuals’ anecdotes that challenge and enrich our class content.

During our Thursday class last week, we were discussing Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, and I described the basics of Malcolm Gladwell’s critique of social media recently printed in the New Yorker as a way of illustrating possible alternatives to Shirky’s perspective. I was curious to see if my students – who are Facebook fans (so to speak) but Twitter skeptics – tended to identify with Shirky or Gladwell.

Our discussion strayed to interpersonal relationships, rather than focusing on social movements. One of my students described a personal experience that demonstrated his own view of the types of interpersonal ties created by social media. He stated that he had an acquaintance with whom he interacted primarily on Facebook, and thought that he had a great deal of common ground with this person and would enjoy the friend’s company in person. But when they met, he found the Facebook friend to be completely incompatible as an offline friend. Their personalities clashed. He’d had no idea that their interaction would be so uncomfortable.

His experience led the class to explore a question I’d never really considered before. One of the benefits of participating in interpersonal relationships – offline, where difficult personality quirks can’t be avoided – is that we ourselves grow personally from learning to cope with other people. Though that might sound a bit self-centered, it is certainly one of the side effects of participating in relationships, for most of us: we become better able to, well, participate in relationships.

But in social networking, we all present to each other only our best faces. We rarely post things that could lead others to think poorly of us (i.e., we post “self-promotional content”). Like my student’s difficult acquaintance, we all have difficult aspects of our personalities, but we don’t make those public if we want to continue interacting with social networking tools. The witty status updates, the cautiously selected profile pictures, the tidbits of personal data that we provide to our networks are those that we hope will cause others to think well of us. Even text messaging and e-mail – with their lack of spontaneous, unedited interaction – provide fewer opportunities for our more distasteful characteristics to surface.

So what about those difficult personality quirks? What about the opportunities for growth we have in our relationships when we deal with each other and all aspects of our natures, even those uncomfortable characteristics?

For older people and those less active in social networking and other types of online communication, these questions may seem irrelevant. Many people’s online friends are still also those with whom they also interact in person during daily life. But for most of my students – who laughingly admit that they chat online and text message with people in the same room at times – these online modes of relating are the norm. I wonder if the types of interaction among all of their ideal personalities online will reduce their opportunities to learn to have effective relationships, or will alter their methods of growing from their personal relationships.

Popular Nonfiction in the Classroom: A Mid-Semester Update

11 Oct

My class's apparent impact on Amazon: search for Ad Nauseam, get all of these results (the rest of our reading list).

Earlier this year, I posted about my intent to choose six popular nonfiction titles in lieu of a textbook for my introductory “Mass Communication and Society” course this fall, as inspired by Joshua Kim’s post at Inside Higher Ed. I followed through on the idea, and am now in the middle of the semester, about to select books for next spring. (Our textbook orders are due October 15 for spring 2011, which is frustrating when two books haven’t even come up on our schedule yet.)

Here’s the final list of books I adopted this fall:

  • Fame Junkies by Jake Halpern
  • Ad Nauseam by Carrie McLaren, Jason Torchinsky and Rob Walker
  • True Enough by Farhad Manjoo
  • Journalism in Crisis by Neal Cortell
  • Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky
  • Republic.com 2.0 by Cass Sunstein

My 116 students in this course (no TAs, no discussion sections, two 75-minute sessions per week) have been assigned 50-75 pages of reading from one of these books per class session – a hefty chunk, especially for freshmen and sophomores. I’ve created a variety of tasks intended to support the reading, including a student-produced study guide for every session that’s posted on Blackboard, online “blog posts” on the Discussion Board that rotate among groups for every session, and small group “discussion warm-ups” in every class meeting, in addition to daily iClicker reading review quizzes. (You can see the whole syllabus here, which contains links to these assignments and their descriptions.)

So far, based on an anonymous, optional mid-semester SurveyMonkey class survey, just over 70 percent of the class says they have done either about three-quarters or all of the reading assigned. Sure, the survey respondents are probably the more motivated folks anyway, but I’m still hopeful about that result.

The students have taken to the books pretty well. Eighty percent “liked” or “loved” Fame Junkies; 77 percent liked or loved Ad Nauseam; but only 38 percent said the same for True Enough. They seemed to find the concepts from True Enough to be interesting during class discussions, but they struggled with the political anecdotes used as illustrations; they are too young to remember the 2004 election and the Swift Boaters, for example. Overall, our class discussions have been quite active (especially since I now have a grade linked to successful discussion, as inspired by a presentation I attended at the CSU Teaching Symposium in San Bernardino last spring).

For the spring, I’m planning on changing up the books a bit. Fame Junkies and Ad Nauseam will stay on the list, but I’m going to rotate in some newer books: Blur: How to Know What’s True in the Age of Information Overload for journalism, I Live in the Future & Here’s How it Works for Internet/technology, and The No-Nonsense Guide to Global Media for a bit more of a global and political perspective. I’m concerned that the students will struggle this semester with the density of Republic.com 2.0; Journalism in Crisis turned out to have a rather awkward structure, and the associated documentary wasn’t fabulous; and though I like Here Comes Everybody a lot, I Live in the Future also looks promising and is brand new.

I think the students are getting more out of this class than they did when I used the typical approach to this course, in which media industries are usually approached one by one and discussed in terms of their history, their current status, and a few of their possibilities for the future. Not only are students learning to read a different kind of text – something I feel will have value across for their future courses and their lives – but they are also being exposed to a great many real-world examples of media issues that they are going to encounter as media consumers and (for some) as professionals.

And I’m enjoying teaching the class a lot more. That’s never a bad thing. I’m giving up some of the structure I used to impose on classes through lecture with slides, devoting a lot more time to discussion and group work, and working in some of the media history and giving multimedia examples when needed. I can respond to questions in class much more freely in this approach than when I had, oh, 30 slides to “get through” in class and felt guilty if I spent too much time on questions and didn’t make it through the presentation.

I have more fun reading these books and teaching with them than I ever did with any textbook I’ve used, and if my enthusiasm can be contagious and help students also feel more motivated to ask significant questions about the media, then I’m thrilled.

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