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?

It’s amazing what you find when you search for “collection” on Flickr.

I have a new post up at PBS MediaShift, covering a new development at digital magazine company Zinio. Zinio is now creating Content Collections:

Zinio staff highlight a selection of articles from Zinio’s digital magazine offerings, mixing and matching stories from a wide variety of magazines within each collection. Even little-known and foreign magazines are included in the mixes. Readers can then preview individual articles in the collection and choose to buy the single digital magazine issue where an article appeared, or even buy a digital subscription to that magazine.

The idea of blending content from different magazines into one package (eventually purchasable as a single deal) is interesting, but even more compelling is the idea that individual readers will eventually be able to create their own collections and share them with friends.

“We’ve been working on the concept of choosing what you love and being able to share it,” Mullen said. “We want to make it possible for consumers to do what editors do. We can let consumers build [collections] for us.”

What will the role of the magazine editor be in the future? With editors at Ladies’ Home Journal now editing user-generated content, and readers soon generating their own collections of content, we’re clearly seeing some major changes in editors’ tasks and roles.

Read more about Zinio’s new innovation at MediaShift.

Eh, not so much.

I flipped past those pages in record time to get to something more interesting.

Why? These recipes had no story.

Most of my recipes today come from blogs and from cookbooks written by those bloggers that I’ve purchased. Admittedly, since adopting a plant-based diet, I’ve found that most magazines’ recipes don’t work for me — but I’m still intrigued by unique concoctions and, more importantly, the stories of chefs and home cooks who have developed fun food. I will loiter on even the meatiest magazine recipe when something more is provided — something that helps me see the human experience of the food that is being shared with me in the magazine’s pages. After all, we love sharing food with each other as a social occasion and as an opportunity to bond. Sitting down with a magazine and reading about food within it ought to be a chance to get to know the people behind the recipes, to hear their voices and stories.

Food bloggers offer the stories of their recipes all the time, which is part of what makes them so popular — so much so that publishers go to them in order to capitalize on their existing audiences and brands. (Food bloggers even have their own conference!)

Sharing recipes online with friends is now another way we bond through food. Finding a friend’s post of a recipe with the comment “Here’s what we made for dinner!” opens up conversations and new possibilities. In 2011, 49 percent of adults in one study said they’d learned about food and recipes from social media. I certainly have, and when I do, I get to thank my friends for leading me to great new tastes. Magazines can’t offer that direct social interaction, but they can do it through good storytelling around food and recipes.

Even the most beautifully photographed recipe in a magazine can’t build a sense of emotional connection with another human, if the story of the recipe is missing. Without a story, the recipe is a commodity, interchangeable with any other.

And, alas, the same is true for some other categories of magazine content these days.

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.

I have a new post at PBS MediaShift this morning, examining some creative ways magazines are using Pinterest. I tried to go beyond the standard boards that it seems every major magazine has created on the site to find some different strategies, particularly those used by different types of magazines that you might not expect to see on Pinterest — in other words, not lifestyle magazines, and not women’s magazines.

I included activist magazines (an interest of mine for some time, which I’ve also covered for MediaShift and researched (PDF)] and B2B magazines (also previously covered on MediaShift).

I hope there are some useful ideas for all magazines among these diverse uses of Pinterest.

Here’s what my browser windows looked like while researching this story:

It was real punishment, I tell you.

Anyway, I found some fun and different approaches, including some involving convenience store bathrooms and cannabis (not in the same magazine). Read the full story at PBS MediaShift.

Photo mashup by me, using magazine cover photo by Font Shop on Flickr.

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.

Who gets to curate and who doesn't?

I’m following the nascent debate over the need for more formal standards for curation of web content. The recent release of the “Curator’s Code” has sparked debate over whether we need not just symbols (ᔥ for ‘via’ and ↬ for ‘hat tip’) to denote material located through another source or individual, but even a “Council on Ethical Blogging and Aggregation.” Both of these systems hope to ensure that bloggers and online writers attribute information to their sources completely and accurately, using more than just the longstanding practice of including a hyperlink to the original source.

Though I’m quite skeptical of the utility of both the proposed code and council, this debate made me think of the ways journalism  as a profession sought recognition as a formal occupation with consistent “products” in the form of news stories. David Mindich, a professor at Saint Michael’s College in Vermont, traced the rise of the norm of “objectivity” and the journalistic focus on “facts” in his excellent book Just the Facts: How Objectivity Came to Define American Journalism. Mindich notes that American journalists’ use of the inverted pyramid “reflect[ed] a new age concerned with facts” (p. 65) and offered a straightforward format that removed seemingly extraneous detail and chronological storytelling from the mix. It was also, critically, a method that journalists had to learn to use (perhaps requiring formal journalism education for the first time); a way of removing perception of ‘human error’ from the recounting of news, as if it were truly “just the facts”; and a means of standardizing the news product to make it recognizable to creators and audiences, regardless of topic.

It strikes me that online curation, as a developing occupation that now provides a reasonable income to some people, may now be feeling the need for professionalizing tactics like the adoption of a “code” and “council” (a.k.a., “boundary work“). If you have to learn how to use special symbols or how to abide by a council’s standards for your work – or face social media denigration – then you must surmount a barrier to entry into that profession that helps it retain its distinctive qualities for those already within it.

I wonder to what degree these proposals truly serve the audiences who use curated content, and to what degree they serve curators themselves – who likely have good intentions but would also benefit from the professionalization of their work. There is value to being able to trace the source of information, to be sure, but adequate means of doing so are already available and widely known. (Among journalists, simple linking is a vital practice, though still emergent.) It will be interesting to trace whether and how digital curators continue to define their unique task and whether the code or council succeed…or whether the term “curation” even survives in the long run.

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.

My story about Esquire’s creative new approach to marketing a major story – a video trailer – is now up at PBS MediaShift.

Though a few other folks have covered this story, I was able to get a little more behind-the-scenes info from the Esquire and Hearst Digital Media crew that put the trailer together. I also tried to give a bit more context for the development of trailers for magazine stories as perhaps the next step from book promotions using video.

Is this a promising new step in magazine marketing, or just a one-time success? Let me know what you think in the comments!

Photo mashup by me using film image by Travis Homung on Flickr.