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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!

Recent Stuff Roundup: Teaching, City/Regional Magazines, Research

18 Nov

H u s t l e & B u s t l e

This has been an exceptionally hectic week, including both my trip to the National Communication Association conference in San Francisco, where I presented, and the usual pre-Thanksgiving shuffle of student assignments and meetings on campus. So, in lieu of an original blog post this week, I’ll give you a roundup of some recent stuff that I haven’t previously posted here.

“Control in the Classroom” at the University of Venus

I recently wrote a guest blog post for the University of Venus blog at Inside Higher Ed. In it, I describe my early teaching failures and how I’ve attempted to grow from them by trying to become a more open, (somewhat) less structured teacher.

Once the adrenaline wore off after about four class sessions, I realized that those sighs coming from the students weren’t due to the enlightenment they felt upon entering into my instructional presence. They were groans of pain as they massaged their hands after trying to take notes on my speed-lecturing. There may have also been groans of boredom.

Check out the full post here.

City and Regional Magazines Go Digital

I’ve been curious about city and regional magazines since grad school, and even did my dissertation on Texas Monthly. I took the opportunity in a recent MediaShift post to explore what these magazines are doing in the digital realm. I especially loved learning more about the history of Honolulu Magazine, which has its roots in the early history of Hawaii and the desire to present the islands as “civilized.” Sounds like a future research study to me!

Read the whole post at MediaShift here.

Make Magazine and Technological Utopianism Research Presentation

At NCA, I presented a paper I’m working on that addresses technological utopianism in Make magazine and at the Maker Faire event. I used a Prezi at a conference for the first time. I don’t know how much is intelligible from the Prezi alone, and would also say that I’m still learning how to make the most of Prezi! But here’s the presentation for your perusal. I hope to publish the paper in a journal very soon and will post here when I do.

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.

Assessing Journalism Education from All Directions

23 Sep

I’ve recently become more involved with assessment efforts at my university, partly out of an initial skepticism about the concept, and partly out of a realization that the implementation of assessment activities is now out of the hands of university administrators and instead increasingly required by outside accreditation agencies and state/federal government. Therefore, I wanted to understand assessment better and try to help influence it positively on our campus as much as possible.

One of the first steps in assessing students’ learning in any context is to define the outcomes [PDF]: what do we want students to learn? Then we can determine which standards to use to assess their learning. In today’s journalism programs, this process is challenging.

Certainly we want students to learn the varied skills they need to produce journalism and eventually find jobs: reporting, writing, editing, multimedia. These are professional, vocational skills, and therefore their success would be best measured by the standards for quality used by journalism professionals.

We also want students to learn to be critical and thoughtful [PDF] regarding journalism and its place in our society. That outcome is in some ways in opposition to professional ideals, which today may too often value speed and SEO over reflection and independent critique. The standards used to assess students’ development as critical thinkers about journalism, then, are rather different from the vocational standards used to measure their work. In the academic setting, these standards usually stem from the study of journalism’s role as a societal institution, but perhaps also could come from public critiques of journalism, especially for students whose programs are engaged in producing news for their local communities. I think that’s an exciting opportunity for assessing student work and helping students understand their true impact of their work.

We’re also starting to see the evolution of journalism curricula that incorporate a new range of business-oriented skills into students’ training, such as the Entrepreneurial Journalism graduate program at CUNY spearheaded by Jeff Jarvis. Students in such courses and programs learn how to brand themselves, represent their work independently, create collaborative projects, and thus develop an entrepreneurial mindset that is different from someone seeking to conform to a supervisor’s expectations. Assessing these entrepreneurial abilities and attitudes is rather more challenging. We don’t yet have clear standards for what it means to have achieved these outcomes. We can determine whether students have the factual knowledge of, say, business law that they need to be successful entrepreneurs, but assessing whether they have acquired the inventive, resilient mindset needed for success is difficult. Whose standards apply to this assessment? Not those of traditional professional journalism, and those of journalism critics don’t quite apply either.

I think one of the biggest challenges journalism educators face today in developing effective, authentic assessment activities for their departments is reconciling these myriad perspectives on what it means to be a successful journalism student today. I can think of few other disciplines in which students are pulled in so many directions.

Are you a journalism educator who has worked on these kinds of assessment issues? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

Resources for Grad Students

25 Aug
kid to do list, list, Be happy and go home

Ah, for the days when our to-do lists were so simple. From Carissa Rogers on Flickr.

I originally posted this on the course site for my Introduction to Graduate Studies in Mass Communication class, but thought I’d cross-post here as many who visit this site are likely interested in some of these resources as well. These are all books, software, and tools I discussed with my students on the first night of class. If you have other resources I should add, let me know in the comments!

Grad School and Academic Life

To-Do and Project Management

Time Management

Reference Management

Writing Tools

Higher Education News and Job Listings

Academic Job Search Resources

Miscellaneous

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