1. Pinterest. Yes, I’m as tired of the hype around Pinterest as anyone (and I might have contributed to that hype a bit), but I do think it has some interesting possibilities for media studies classes in which visual components are important. I’m teaching Media, Politics, and Public Opinion this fall, and I’m thinking of having students create Pinterest boards of political videos, images and materials they find online or in the physical world.

This activity was inspired by this post about a theater design instructor’s experience using Pinterest at Keene State College. She said:

I could actually push them immediately to the next level to understand why these images are exciting and which ones are for another project for another day…I took pictures of their design models and you can clearly see the connection between what they chose to do in the model with the research they did. Connections happened so I was super excited! The results are night and day between this class that used Pinterest for visual research because of the comments and feedback before they started to use the images. So I think for me Pinterest is the way to go for visual research.

I like the ease of use, the commenting and sharing features, and the public nature of the work students would collect on a board. For class topics focused on visual materials, Pinterest seems like a terrific option.

(…as long as we don’t get distracted by boards like the one below.)

One of the more, um, intriguing Pinterest boards on a political topic, called “Obama…wtf.”

2. Open-access textbooks. I like assigning online articles, but sometimes I wish students could get a basic explanation of important concepts in a simple textbook style, without the issues presented by Wikipedia entries, or the challenges and cost of clearing textbook material for library course reserves.

I’m really excited about the possibility of assigning a chapter or two from open-access textbooks like those available through this University of Minnesota online catalog — which even includes peer reviews of the textbooks’ content.

The open-access social psychology textbook.

For example, in the Media, Politics, and Public Opinion class, I might assign the chapter on attitudes, behavior, and persuasion from a freely available social psychology textbook so that students have a solid, basic explanation of these key concepts.

I also like that this approach demonstrates for students both a) the interdisciplinary nature of our inquiry into this topic and b) the free resources available to them online as learners.

3. It looks like I’ll be teaching a class on media, war, and terrorism soon, building on my master’s thesis research on embedded reporters in Iraq and my recent project on Al Qaeda’s digital magazine. I find that students don’t usually have the historical background to jump right into complex topics like that. I think we’ll spend some time constructing an online timeline together to help them both to contextualize key world events and to grasp changes in government regulation of wartime journalism and other key issues. My colleague Michael Huntsberger inspired this project through his use of timelines in his History of Mass Media class.

A timeline of terrorist attacks via Daniel X. O’Neil on Flickr.

There are a lot of different timeline tools out there, and the choice depends partly on whether you can embed the finished product on a site you control or need for it to be hosted elsewhere. I’m considering Timeline by VéritéCo, which plays nicely with Google Spreadsheets (perfect for student collaboration), and which can be embedded on my self-hosted WordPress sites. There are also Timetoast and Tiki-Toki to consider.

***

More generally, I am also thinking about ways I can offer students more options for assignments that use online tools, in addition to traditional writing components. I want them to gain media literacy by understanding how the online content with which they interact every day is created…and I want them to gain experience in selecting appropriate communication tools for various types of information and audiences. Asking students to choose topics that interest them and to select the most relevant methods for communication about those topics seems an absolutely appropriate task for me to assign. There are so many exciting possibilities.

What are your hopes and plans for using technology in teaching during 2012-13?

Flipping this summer...

I don’t just lecture for entire class periods — not without at least some student interaction and discussion, of course. I have lots of class activities and games that I use often. So, I’ve never been just a “sage on the stage,” I hope. But in my field — media studies and journalism — it makes little sense to me anymore to spend time in class reviewing basic facts about media industries or lecturing on grammatical concepts. I want my class time to be about collectively analyzing media texts, developing students’ individual analytic skills, examining case studies, collaborating on creative projects, and enjoying the intellectual engagement that comes out of all of those activities. While sometimes a mini-lecture might be useful for these activities, class time should be about deepening students’ comprehension of and ability to use what they have studied before arriving in class.

I know that for some journalism and media educators at the university level, this concept is already old news (ha, ha), so I’d love to know more about how others have fully adopted this strategy in their classes. While I know recorded lectures are a common component of flipped classrooms, I am not especially interested in recording my own lectures and requiring students to listen to them outside of class. (I would hate having to do that as a student.) I would prefer that they use high-quality online videos and texts, interactive online activities designed by me or others, the occasional video or podcast that I’d produce, and online quizzes prior to coming to class — whatever the appropriate mix for the topic of the day. (Here’s an article on the debate over the ideal implementation of the flipped classroom at Stanford; the many comments are interesting.)

I am concerned that some students will expect that class time is when they are fed information, rather than the time when they work on clarifying and applying their understanding of concepts. If you’ve flipped your classroom, how did you encourage student buy-in, especially as not all faculty have adopted this approach and still continue to be sages on stages?

Finally, I get a lot of visitors to this blog because I’ve posted in the past about using my iPad for teaching purposes. I think that a tablet is the great tool for the flipped classroom, as it allows the instructor and students to move around much more freely, to pass online material back and forth, and to immediately call up a variety of information and multimedia to share. I’m looking forward to taking advantage of those opportunities as my classes move more in this direction.

My slides are below. I’ll also address some of the concerns attendees raised.

Below are some of the major concerns attendees mentioned. I’ll address these primarily through the lens of using Twitter for my classes, but most of these points would apply to other social media applications as well.

• Further fragmentation of students’ attention through the use of social media.

As we know, both students and faculty face a constantly growing stream of information and input from media sources. Whether requiring them to participate in social media would further divide their attention and focus — as opposed to deepening their engagement with course content — is a legitimate question. My personal take on this — as someone who has unquestionably become far more immersed in her field of study through social media — is that deepening engagement is absolutely possible. However, I realize I’m a bit weird. If nothing else, I would hope that if students are finding their attention already fragmented by the flow of media, we can at least insert into that flow some items that might enrich their experiences in our courses. I also hope that at least some students will take the opportunity offered by courses’ use of social media to read (longer, often better) content that faculty highlight for them in social media. Perhaps it’s best to try to find students where they already are, in the middle of that stream of (social) media content, and get our courses’ content and ideas into that flow.

• [Even greater] commercialization of the educational experience through the requirement of participation in social media, and the provision of student information to companies for data mining.

This has been a concern of mine for some time. As a journalism and media professor, I am constantly working to raise students’ awareness of what they are doing with for-profit media and what, in turn, is being done with/to them. I am truly disappointed by the ways both K-12 and higher education have been subjected to commercial influences in exchange for sometimes life-sustaining funding. That said, I also am in a position that requires me to train students in the use of media production tools that are created by for-profit companies, some of which also will use their data to market to the students in turn. I try to reduce our use of those tools when possible. (For example, I pay out of my own pocket for external hosting of the websites used by the two courses I currently teach in order to avoid the advertising usually present on free sites.) But today’s prospective media professional needs to know how to use Twitter and Facebook, among other tools, for professional purposes. I would be remiss if I did not teach students in my field how to use those things.

So, there are a couple of options here. One is to repudiate these tools’ use completely if their corporations’ goals and practices are not in line with a faculty member’s personal philosophy. Another (which I feel is more realistic and responsible) is to use these tools, but meanwhile, also to maintain a constant dialogue with students about them that supports a critical awareness of the true nature of these tools and of their greater impact on society. In this way, we can combine the best of multiple worlds: we can increase engagement with our course topics, teach media literacy, and provide students a valuable skill that has professional applications.

• Impact on faculty workload.

Tracking students’ social contributions is one challenge. When you’re teaching large classes, requiring students to tweet a certain number of times or contribute a certain amount of content to a social site may be just impossible because there’s no way to efficiently track their work. I don’t require tweeting in my larger classes. That said, there are web tools available to help track Twitter activity; I currently am using iffft to send all of my Media Writing students’ tweets (#mscm175) to an Evernote notebook. At the end of the semester, I’ll count up their tweets to ensure they did their required four tweets per week. In the meantime, I monitor their tweets with a dedicated column on TweetDeck. That’s a class of just 12 students, though. For a class of 120, like I used to teach, I would just make social participation an option — one that helps students who choose to use it feel closer to the professor and other students, and that gives quiet students an opportunity to speak up. Using Twitter as a backchannel during class is also an option for the courageous professor, but out-of-class use is a great approach too. There might also be ways that social media-based projects could replace other assignments that would be graded anyway. At any rate, the point is that faculty don’t have to require students to use social media, and therefore, don’t have to add work in assessing it.

Another aspect of using social media in teaching is, of course, that the faculty member is responsible for generating content — for finding links to interesting and relevant online materials and disseminating them through his/her selected social methods. Ideally, students will also begin generating some items, but the instructor is still going to be responsible for doing the bulk of the work. Personally, I find plenty to share with my students in my everyday online reading. I also subscribe to a variety of blogs, many of which are relevant to my classes, so that’s additional social media fodder. To store up some of the items I find, I use Buffer to schedule tweets (there are many such tools, but this is an easy and free option). Buffer lets me post Tweets on a regular schedule, rather than dumping a ton of links into my Twitter feed at once. This is especially handy when I am catching up on blog reading and find much worth sharing. Odds are, most faculty will have plenty to say in social outlets.

Finally, there’s the additional potential workload of responding to students and others who send personal messages through social media. I haven’t found these conversations to be overwhelming at all, and am always delighted when a student sends me a tweet instead of an email because it establishes a new means of communication between us. It also demonstrates that the student feels comfortable enough with me and with the medium to reach out through it. Having conversations this way might not be for everyone (and maintaining privacy is always a concern), but I enjoy it. I’ve also made a ton of academic and professional contacts through social media that have benefited my career greatly. I could write another full post about that topic. I wouldn’t have been on this WPSA roundtable, for example, if I hadn’t ‘met’ Janni through Twitter!

• Use of social media by students for causing change or advocacy, not just for spreading information.

One of the great points that came up in our discussion was the opportunity to encourage students to try to cause change through their uses of social media. Elsa Dias of Pikes Peak Community College mentioned the recent uses of social media by young people in the Middle East to organize and, ultimately, to provoke massive change in their countries. She compared those uses to the generally unprovocative uses of social media by American youth. I loved the suggestion that we might encourage students to be stronger advocates for the causes they believe in through their social media engagement. There’s plenty of work to be done in just building students’ basic understanding of the appropriate use of social media, but I can definitely see ways in which students who have gained some sophistication with the tools might begin working toward change and creating networks of like-minded young people.

Along with this discussion, however, came a concern for students’ understanding of their civic responsibility in using social media. I mentioned the Kony 2012 campaign, and noted how many students (and adults!) passed along the campaign’s materials using social media before making any effort to personally research or gain insight into the issues portrayed. Along with the critical awareness of social media’s corporate/for-profit nature described above, we also must emphasize with students that when they pass along ideas and links in social media, they are responsible for ensuring that those items are worthy of further distribution. (I’ve written a bit before on the critical reading and writing skills that social media use requires.) If they don’t agree with the items or are skeptical, they need to comment appropriately to express that concern. By encouraging students to maintain that critical stance, we’re helping them prepare more deeply for a world where that constant flow of information will likely only intensify.

I was on a panel with two other terrific magazine researchers and professors, Erin Coyle of Louisiana State (who also organized the panel – thanks, Erin!) and Yanick Rice Lamb of Howard University. I enjoyed hearing about Erin’s research on trends in magazine course syllabi and about Yanick’s study on uses of digital technology by major women’s magazines.

Here are my slides from my presentation. I think they’re self-explanatory, but if you have questions, let me know in the Comments!

At least I don't use red ink.

I gave my Introduction to Media Writing students a 60-question grammar diagnostic test at the start of the spring 2012 semester. Based on the results, here are the areas we need to cover most during our course, in descending order of the frequency of missed questions:

1. Pronouns and pronoun agreement (especially the incorrect use of they to refer to a singular antecedent, despite debate; who/whom; us/we and I/me as objects)
2. Comma splices, run-on sentences, and sentence fragments (oh, for the lost days of diagramming sentences!)
3. Irregular verbs (lay/lie, of course, but also write, drag, and others)
4. Parallel construction
5. Subject-verb agreement
6. The use of apostrophes to form possessives
7. The use of commas with restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses
8. (Four-way tie) The use of colons; verb tense consistency; modifiers; and precision in word order (e.g., the placement of only)

Here’s what the authors of the textbook Easy Writer say are the 20 most common grammatical errors. It looks like our class shares the same challenges. And I still double-check some of these issues when I write, so I certainly wouldn’t claim grammatical perfection!

I’m sure we aren’t the only class who will work on these topics this semester. I’ve developed games for teaching some of them, but don’t have fun strategies yet for all of them.

Do you have favorite exercises or activities for teaching and coaching grammar? I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

Because of a couple of my past posts, people often find my blog when they’re looking for information on teaching with the iPad. So I thought I might give an update on the technology tools I’m using in my teaching and personal productivity this semester on various platforms. I’ve mentioned some of these before, but it’s interesting to track which ones have infiltrated my workflow permanently and which have failed to prove their utility (for my purposes, at least).

Yahoo! Pipes configuration...not as hard as it looks.

In the Classroom

• Attendance iPad app. I used its photo-management feature to take photos of all my students on the first day of classes this semester. A great tool for learning names more quickly (always a huge struggle for me) and for tracking attendance accurately. Though its interface is plain – taking roll isn’t sexy – it’s a valuable app.
• Alas, I don’t really do classroom presentations on the iPad. I thought I’d end up using Keynote from the iPad in the classroom, in lieu of toting my laptop to class. Nope. I ran into initial compatibility problems with an old version of Keynote on my laptop, and then realized that my photo- and video-heavy slideshows are difficult to create on the iPad anyway. So I’m still just using my MacBook Pro in class for Keynote.
• However, beyond Keynote: The iPad now projects whatever you show on the screen through the VGA adapter. Hooray! I’ve now been able to demonstrate digital magazines and books to students using the iPad in class.
• Evernote. I create class notes or guest lecture outlines on my laptop in Evernote, then access them on the iPad when needed. Incredibly handy and paper-saving.
• Caffeine (Mac only). A simple plugin that prevents your screen from dimming or turning off during presentations and video viewing. So useful.
• I learned how to use Yahoo! Pipes this semester to aggregate my students’ blog posts and pull them into our class website (a WordPress.org installation on my own domain) as one feed. It was much easier to do than I thought it would be.
• AP Stylebook. I subscribed to the digital/app version so I never have to take the book to class, and I never leave it in the office over the weekend when I need it for grading at home. That happened far too often, and it’s been worth it (yes, worth $24!) to not have to worry about this problem.

Some of the comments stored in my "Commonly Used" list in GradeMark.

Grading and Feedback

• I use two apps for simple grading calculations because I am lazy. The iPad app is called GroovyGrader, and it’s free (with ads). The iPhone app is called EasyGrader and costs 99 cents. (Both work on either device. I like GroovyGrader on the iPad because I don’t have to scroll to see the full list of possible grades.) When you just want to know the grade out of 100 points when a student misses 5 questions on a 40-question exam, and you don’t want to do the math every time or create an Excel spreadsheet…this is your app.
• I used the GradeMark feature of Turnitin in Blackboard for the first time this semester. I have concerns about Turnitin as a company due to its use of its student paper database for a new service that students can purchase prior to turning in their work that alerts them to possible plagiarism. I found GradeMark so easy to use, though (darn it), that I’ve decided to continue to use it this year and then explore other options. The GradeMark system allows the instructor to see Turnitin’s originality report information and also attach comments (both unique to that student or pre-prepared from a customizable database) for a student’s paper. The standard comments come with explanations of writing concepts (e.g., students can immediately be reminded of what a comma splice is when they view that comment). The comments are saved online for the student to access. The grade attached to the paper is automatically posted in Blackboard’s gradebook. The instructor can even see whether a student has viewed the feedback provided. You can download the papers in one zipped file so you always have a backup and a record of what students received from you. In all, I have to admit it’s a pretty cool system.
• What did not work for me: a couple of years ago, I tried using a Wacom Bamboo tablet (a nice little device that I still use when I weary of a mouse or trackpad) to mark up student papers in Adobe Acrobat. This was a hugely time-consuming process that required me to first create PDFs of student papers, attempt to scribble neatly on them with the tablet, and then email the copy with feedback back to students. Ugh. Never again.

Communicating with Students and Colleagues

• I am a Twitter aficionado and use TweetDeck on my MacBook and the official Twitter apps for iPad and iPhone. TweetDeck lets me easily track all the tweets from my current students on their class lists and all the activity around their class hashtags.
• I have used Jing a number of times this semester and in previous years to create screencast tutorials for various online activities students need to complete (such as creating a blog on WordPress.com). These tutorials save me untold hours of demonstrating in person and writing directions in emails. I also have used Jing for providing feedback to students on online work that is difficult to comment upon otherwise. I can narrate what I see in their work (e.g., a blog post), point at and highlight things with the mouse cursor, type into their documents, and then send them a secure link to the online video, which is quickly uploaded to Screencast.com through the Jing software. One caution: my students watched the screencasts so many times this semester that I had to upgrade my Screencast.com account to a pro account ($9.99/month) to ensure that the necessary bandwidth was available. That was a bummer, and I’ll be re-evaluating my use of Jing+Screencast.com for tutorials. For individual feedback, though, I think this is a great combination. Students responded positively to it as well.

Unsubscribe.com button for Mail plugin. Note my brief, sweet Inbox Zero.

Productivity

• I learned about Unsubscribe.com this fall, and have been using it to aggressively reduce the amount of automated email I receive. I use Apple Mail and have installed the Unsubscribe plugin. When I receive automated mail I no longer want, I just select the message and click the Unsubscribe button in my toolbar. The service then automagically unsubscribes me. It’s pretty awesome. There are plugins available for other email apps as well. (Incidentally, I think I’m also saving money by not getting so many shopping-related emails!)
• Although many to-do lists are available out there, I’ve stuck with Toodledo. It’s simple, has a clean web interface, works with my iPhone and iPad, and is reliable.
• Google Calendar is wonderful and allows me to have not only my personal calendar, but also calendars for my individual classes that can be embedded on my class websites (like this). It’s helpful for me to see all my upcoming events and deadlines – and theirs – in one place.
• Dropbox and SugarSync are cloud storage services that I appreciate very much. Dropbox works with many iPad/iPhone apps, making it a central point for storing file I might need to access elsewhere. SugarSync is similar, but is configured to automatically back up key folders on my laptop ($59/year, but the peace of mind is worth it). I can also access anything in those key folders anywhere I have Internet access, which has been helpful on a couple of occasions.
• TextExpander. My students may suspect this by now, but every time they get an email from me that ends with “Please let me know if you have more questions,” I’ve actually only typed “ppl” – and TextExpander has done the rest. I have used this tool for numerous grading and writing purposes over the time I’ve had it installed. (All those Texas Monthlys in my dissertation, with their annoying italics? I typed only “TM” every time.) The software reports that it has saved me over 30 hours of typing during our wonderful time together.
• FocusBooster is a great Pomodoro Technique app that – when the going (read: grading) gets tough – allows me to work for 20 minutes, then knit take a 5-minute break (or whatever intervals I need). When you just can’t bring yourself to work, sometimes settling into just 20 minutes of work (at first) seems much more doable.

Reading and Writing

• I use Reeder for reading RSS feeds on the iPad (after trying many other RSS readers for the iPad). I use Google Reader pretty much solely as a subscription manager at this point, and just sync my account with Reeder for more comfortable reading away from the computer on the iPad or iPhone.
• I use Readability to reformat websites for easier reading, and I use Instapaper (on the iPad and soon on a new Kindle) to save long stories to read later. Interesting stuff gets saved to my Pinboard account for later reference. (Pinboard also automatically saves any tweet I send that includes a link, so I never have to wonder, “What was that article I tweeted the other day?”) Pinboard is worth every penny of the $9-something lifetime membership fee I spent on it. Readability, Instapaper, and Pinboard all work via bookmarklets in my browser. Instapaper and Reeder both work with Twitter and Pinboard, too.
• I enjoy using Outliner on the iPad to develop writing projects. Though it does much the same things as Inspiration, which I have used on the MacBook for a long time, I find it fun and thought-provoking to literally move my ideas around on the screen.

Multimedia

• I have taken up photography as a hobby and have been enjoying using Snapseed and TiltShift Generator to edit photos and upload them to my Flickr account. I also have a lot of fun using FlickStackr to look through photos in Explore on Flickr, which is inspiring and educational for a new photographer! Guardian Eyewitness is also a great iPad app that highlights an amazing work of photojournalism every day. I have more apps I could include in this category, but they’re not strictly teaching-related tools, so…

If you like these kinds of tools and want to keep learning more, I highly recommend that you regularly read the ProfHacker blog and follow it on Twitter as well. Many of these ideas came from ProfHacker initially. I also learned of others from the fabulous folks I follow on Twitter. The community of technology-minded academics there has been an amazing resource for me.

Do you have other technology tools that have made your teaching life easier or more enjoyable? Please share in the comments!

When I was a senior at Trinity University, I took both the Magazine Writing and Magazine Production classes offered in the Department of Communication, even though I was an English major. I still have copies of my production class’s magazine, of which I was the editor.

Those two classes, taught by Sammye Johnson, had a major impact on the path of my education and my later career choices. While I was in grad school, I was fortunate to return to Trinity as a part-time instructor and to teach the production class myself. It was a great challenge, but was also lots of fun.

I was impressed and excited to learn, in the process of writing my latest MediaShift story, that some magazine classes are no longer producing print magazines, but instead have gone all-digital. Though I’m a little sad that the students won’t experience the anticipation and thrill of receiving their freshly printed magazines at the end of the semester, the new directions of these innovative courses are well-suited to today’s changing industry.

Read the full story here!

Photos and Photoshopping by me, with guest appearances from the When Words Collide textbook, the AP Stylebook for iPhone, Backpacker’s iPad edition via Zinio…and even a few print magazines, including Afar, Wired, Portland Monthly, and New Scientist.

Useful Links

• 20 Common Mistakes Made by New Bloggers
• Creating a good About page
• Maintaining blogging momentum
• Lots of details on legal issues for media producers
• 40 Lessons Learned Over Five Years of Blogging
• How to verify links before you re-post them
• How bloggers make money with blogs
• 10-point posting checklist
• Creative Commons-licensed photos at Flickr

Here’s the Prezi I’m going to use in my talk with them, and after the jump, a long list of resources and examples of what I’m discussing. If you have suggestions for other links I should add to this page, please let me know in the comments.

Here are some links to resources and examples to illustrate this presentation.

Storytelling

Examples

• Long-form text stories: choose your favorite topic and study the stories (reverse-engineer them!) What makes them work?
• Using Facebook to tell a story
• “He took a Polaroid every day, until the day he died”: Photos and a few words tell a story
• This American Life tells the story of the housing crash (and it’s not boring)
• Ira Glass of This American Life offers his thoughts on storytelling
• Stories of one place
• A story with a message, but without words (note the title)
• Storytelling with a narrated slideshow
• Six storytelling projects at one link

How-To

• A quick, quality overview
• How good a storyteller are you?
• Storytelling for the web
• Telling a story on Twitter: can it be done?
• A textbook, but a good one that’s cheap if you buy it used

Curation

Examples

• A tool: Storify
• National Journal uses Storify to track discussion of the potential government shutdown
• “Is This the World’s Best Twitter Account?”: Andy Carvin of NPR provides amazing curation of news from the Middle East uprisings
• Mother Jones Libya explainer
• What one newsroom did when faced with a weather emergency: audience content and mobile reporting combined

How-To

• Using Storify and similar curation tools successfully
• Content curator job description
• Twitter tips for college newsrooms
• Accuracy and accountability matter, even (especially?) in social media: a checklist
• Evaluating links before you pass them on

Data Interpretation

Examples

• Another Collegian offers access to a salary database
• The LA Times Data Desk
• New York Times: Mapping America
• Interactive timeline of Middle East protests from The Guardian
• Google Public Data Explorer explanation and unemployment example
• xkcd Radiation Dose Chart
• 50 “most stunning” infographics and visualizations
• The Daily Telegraph puts the audience to work to analyze data

How-To

• Using Many Eyes to build your own interactive graphics
• 10 useful resources about data visualization
• Making effective timelines for journalism
• Types of visualizations and things to think about
• Why journalists should learn to love data
• “Tools to help bring data to your journalism”

Other Interesting Stuff

• Commodity news, commodity pictures, commodity journalism: how can you break the mold?
• Checklist for multimedia accuracy: no matter what tools you use, the fundamental value of accuracy never changes!
• The Washington Post’s StoryLab: where stories are crowdsourced and discussed with the audience
• Thinking deeply about the purpose of links in your online stories
• You need the mobile journalism mindset, as well as the tools for reporting
• Doing radio reporting with nothing but an iPhone 4
• The iPad 2 for journalists
• Getting audio reports online quickly, from Al Jazeera’s work in Egypt
• Newsgames blog and information site and related site Play the News
• Newsrooms resist gaming: includes a couple of examples of games
• The concept of “gamification:” how will you apply it to news?

Photo by user Kuha455405 on Wikimedia Commons.

Moreover, if you’ve taught news and media literacy, or even just had conversations about news with adults, you’ve probably heard people say that one reason they don’t watch news is because of all of the depressing, sad stuff they see. After the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, writer Steve Silberman posted on Twitter, “Since 9/11 or so we’ve all been watching videos that look like the world is ending. I’m getting PVSD or something.”

Perhaps a goal for media literacy instructors might be to help people deal with coverage of these tragic events so that they can stay up-to-date, but don’t develop “PVSD” by doing so.

Silberman’s term PVSD brings to mind PTSD, of course, though media viewers are obviously not frontline victims of the trauma. Yet are media viewers also at risk for psychological harm when they see hours upon hours of crisis coverage? Even though they lack direct contact with those suffering the effects of disaster and war, and do not necessarily experience personal loss or injury, the immediacy of and immersion in the tragedy that are offered by 24/7 news coverage could have a lesser but important effect on audiences.

Photo by Thomas Ahern on Wikimedia Commons.

• Viewing a tragedy live on television appears to strengthen the relationship between media exposure and symptoms of PTSD.
• Some images of tragedy seem more distressing than others. For example, among direct victims of the September 11 attacks, those who frequently viewed images of people falling or jumping from the WTC reported more symptoms of PTSD and depression. It is unclear however, how long this effect lasts.
• Given the sparse research literature, it is difficult to make generalizations. Furthermore, it is unknown if people who are more distressed choose to consume more disaster-related news, or if news of the disaster causes distress, or if there is some other causal mechanism. It is important to note that media coverage may serve as a traumatic reminder to those affected by the event.

So the research is inconclusive so far, but there may be a relationship between viewing media coverage of tragedy and ongoing distress from PTSD- or depression-like symptoms. Additionally, simply avoiding the coverage may not be an option, especially for media and journalism students who are often required to keep up with the news for their classes.

Strategies generally suggested for “self-care” of PTSD might be good ones to recommend to students and other adults finding coverage of tragedy difficult to take. The VA offers some standard suggestions for PTSD sufferers that could be useful in this situation (selected and adapted from this guide for those who have been directly involved in disasters):

• Remind yourself that stress reactions after disaster are common.
• Spend time with or help others. Disasters are unique types of trauma in that most often many people have been affected. Being with family, friends, neighbors, or others may help you realize that you are not the only one affected…Providing support or rebuilding lifts your mood and makes you feel less alone.
• If you are grieving, find a way to honor the losses…Try writing about your loss or creating a ritual, ceremony, or service to express your grief.
• Take a time out if you’re feeling angry. The stress that comes along with disasters can create irritability and anger. This can affect your health, sense of self-control, and relationships.

To this list, I’d add the following suggestions, thinking particularly of my college students:

• Choose your conversation partners carefully. Yes, it’s good to discuss the things you’ve seen in the news with someone else, as the above guidelines recommend. But this is not the time to talk to friends who relish magnifying the drama of every life event, and who will probably not help you keep the current events in perspective. Find your grounded, even-tempered friends to keep you company and discuss these difficult topics.
• Don’t watch or read about the difficult topic too soon before bedtime. Not to sound juvenile, but the effects on your sleep and dream life can be very real. Experiencing events similar to the tragedy even in your dreams can make them feel more real and personal, especially if people from your real life are brought into dream-world situations like those happening in the news.
• Avoid social media discussion of a topic if you are having difficulty coping with it. On one hand, you can get some good information, and social media do let you share your feelings with others. On the other hand, the constant flow of (often unconfirmed) new developments may be overwhelming, and the inability to pre-screen the links on which you’re clicking may lead you to see things you aren’t emotionally prepared to see. Gathering information on the topic in a more deliberate way, using primarily media that have been produced with some time lag for verification, can ensure you stay up-to-date, but don’t have to ride an emotional roller coaster with every new tweet or Facebook status update.

We know that coverage of disaster and war won’t go away anytime soon, and perhaps it will become more graphic in various ways. If we want young people to be able to keep up with the news and deal with its potential consequences for their psychological well-being, it might be helpful to offer them some specific things they can do when faced with wall-to-wall coverage of potentially traumatic events.

Fascinatingly, it seems that surviving trauma, though it’s certainly not a good thing, may for some people result not in PTSD, but in what some researchers (New York Times link; more here) call post-traumatic growth:

P.T.G. research suggests that an encounter with severe trauma can actually lead to highly positive changes in individuals.

It can also increase their resiliency to subsequent adversity. Today, some researchers say that posttraumatic growth is far more common than long-term posttraumatic stress disorder. The norm is to adapt and grow following trauma.

By teaching coping skills for dealing with difficult media content, we can also perhaps help students see that these are, in fact, skills for dealing with a variety of challenging life situations. That’s a valuable lesson that reaches well beyond media literacy.