tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-384181522024-03-05T13:05:47.632-06:00The Note on my DoorIn the old days professors might tape brief notes on their office doors. Welcome to the future.Greg Downeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09154543464555817869noreply@blogger.comBlogger74125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38418152.post-59605089812392648432013-06-25T11:50:00.003-05:002013-06-25T11:50:28.718-05:00It's been a while ...It's been a while since I posted here, and there's a simple reason: I decided to move my web presence over to the Wordpress platform. You can find me at <a href="http://gdowney.wordpress.com/">gdowney.wordpress.com</a> these days. Thank you!Greg Downeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09154543464555817869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38418152.post-8019829414235137462012-05-11T13:24:00.001-05:002012-05-11T13:24:44.113-05:00Social Media for Journalists presentationToday I'll be presenting a talk at the Madison SPJ "Social Media for Journalists" training session. <a href="https://mywebspace.wisc.edu/gdowney/public/SPJ%20social%20media%20talk%202012-05-11%20-%20Downey%20G.pdf">Here's a PDF copy of the slides I'll be talking through</a>.Greg Downeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09154543464555817869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38418152.post-4349575943066428512012-03-27T13:15:00.003-05:002012-03-27T13:49:15.903-05:00Educational Innovation Showcase 2012For anyone who caught my poster session and/or "flash talk" at this years' UW-Madison "Showcase Event," here is the link to the L&S online internship course that I described: <a href="http://interlsinternship.pbworks.com/">http://interlsinternship.pbworks.com/</a><br />
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You can find out more about how L&S manages and promotes internships at this page on the L&S Career Services web site: <a href="http://www.lssaa.wisc.edu/careers/students/internship_prep.html">http://www.lssaa.wisc.edu/careers/students/internship_prep.html</a><br />
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Finally, you can view our latest MIU progress report here: <a href="http://www.apa.wisc.edu/MIU_Year2_Templates/Internships_Liberal_Arts_Template.pdf">July 2011</a> The most important data so far is summarized below:<br />
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Please let me know if you are interested in becoming a faculty instructor in this innovative program -- we welcome colleagues from all disciplines and departments. (And we actually pay you.) Email me at gdowney@wisc.edu if interested!Greg Downeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09154543464555817869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38418152.post-9703719425279808522012-03-24T07:21:00.000-05:002012-03-24T07:21:06.472-05:00ReadIn my role as the director of a big state university academic department, sometimes high school students email me to ask "What should I be doing to prepare for college and my future career?" Here is what I tell them:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Hi ________, very nice to meet you, and glad you are interested in UW-Madison and our School of Journalism & Mass Communication. Besides the standard advice of keeping your grades up, participating in extra-curricular activities, and staying safe and healthy, the only thing I'd suggest is: READ. Read, read, read. Check out books about communication history, or biographies of people you admire and respect in communication, or even college-level communication textbooks from your school library -- all of these will demonstrate that there are many different pathways to a successful communication career. Purchase an online student-rate subscription to a national newspaper like, say, the New York Times (<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/">http://www.nytimes.com/</a>) or visit a free publicly-supported national news source like National Public Radio (<a href="http://www.npr.org/">http://www.npr.org/</a>) and read the top story in each section every single day. Find a used book store in your city and take an afternoon there trying to figure out the best way to spend five bucks. Read long-form journalism at free aggregator sites like Byliner (<a href="http://byliner.com/">http://byliner.com</a>) or Instapaper (<a href="http://www.instapaper.com/">http://www.instapaper.com/</a>), from a broad range of newspapers and magazines, on a broad range of topics that you'd normally avoid. Go to your local public library and ask the librarian what new non-fiction book the school teachers and community activists and business entrepreneurs all seem to be talking about, and read that book. Download a free, pre-1923, public-domain novel from Project Gutenberg (<a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/">http://www.gutenberg.org/</a>) and explore how people lived and talked and dreamed a century ago. Even thick, lush comic books are OK; you can call them "graphic novels" if anyone complains. The more often and more widely and more deeply you read, the better prepared you will be for any college major and any future career. And the better at writing you will become. Best of luck, GREG</blockquote>Greg Downeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09154543464555817869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38418152.post-82698250600376226832012-03-21T14:38:00.002-05:002012-06-04T07:38:06.298-05:00Counterintuitive digital media assignmentsOver the last week in my new first-year undergraduate course, <a href="http://mediafluency.blogspot.com/">Media Fluency for the Digital Age</a>, my students have been wrestling with a very counterintuitive digital media assignment, and I think it's worth exploring why these members of the "born digital" generation found this assignment so difficult — and so rewarding. <br />
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Here's the challenge they were given:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Finding information that's <u>not</u> online. </b> Find an article (research journal article, analytic newspaper article, serious magazine article, or scholarly book chapter) that is on the topic of the Internet or new media, but <u>not</u> available (at least, not to you) on the Internet, and acquire a digital copy of that article. In a one-page, single-spaced write-up, document the steps you took to (a) find the article, (b) ensure that it was not available to you online, and (c) find out how to get it offline, (d) digitize it, (e) use optical character recognition software to make your text searchable, and (f) save the file to MyWebSpace and give your TA permission to view it. Paste the full URL of your file at the end of your write-up.</blockquote>
A little background might help contextualize this assignment. Over the past few weeks we'd been exploring the standard sorts of topics that you might expect in a course like this: how search tools like Google work behind the scenes, how reference sources like Wikipedia are produced through collaborative human and algorithmic labor, how marketers and advertisers try to reach the users of these information resources through search engine optimization and behavioral tracking, and how issues have emerged over balancing private-profit intellectual property claims with public-good fair use or Creative Commons systems. Over the course of our lectures, discussions, and readings on these topics, students work in collaborative groups to build their own weblogs on some topic dealing with "media fluency," posting ideas and trying to build audience, while promoting their work on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. It's all conducted through a "blended" course format which combines in-person instructor contact with online, out-of-class mentored activities. <br />
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So now, a little more than halfway through the class, students are asked to turn their digital expertise and expectations upside-down: to use online search tools specifically for the purpose of figuring out what's <i>not </i>available to them with the click of a mouse, and to go through the process <i>themselves</i> of making a portion of that non-digitized world available in the network realm for future use. <br />
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The student reflections that came back from this assignment really surprised and pleased me. First of all, students found this to be the most difficult assignment in the course yet, expressing much more apprehension than they did when I asked them to explore other new online tools, such as blogs, ad blockers, cloud documents, and even the Web of Knowledge database:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"this process made me feel like I was a cave man. I'm not sure if it was the requirement to use slightly older technology, such as a scanner, or books, for that matter, but I found this process much more difficult than I find most online or digital assignments." </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"I have become accustomed to trying to find things for free online when researching for projects, and this assignment wanted me to do the opposite. I thought this seemed crazy, and so did the guy who helped me at the library. He said no student has ever asked for help with finding material that was not available on the Internet." </blockquote>
Second, as I had hoped, but had not mentioned in the assignment itself, most students turned to human assistance for this assignment, or what one student referred to as "the old fashioned technique, or search engine, if you will, of asking a librarian":<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Once I got to the library, I realized I had absolutely no idea how to use our library system -- which was very embarrassing. I found a reference desk in the library and explained the assignment to a librarian, hoping she could help me. She assisted me in finding a book that was not available online, and then taught me how to use the stacks to locate the book. This aspect of the assignment was quite rewarding because it helped me acquire skills I will use for the remainder of my college experience."</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"we discovered that most articles from the 1990s and later are online. Determined, we worked backwards. Finally, we came across an article that was not online anywhere." </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"The first librarian I asked literally laughed out loud. She couldn't believe that I was asking such a ridiculous question."</blockquote>
What most students eventually came up with was either (a) a chapter of an edited volume on new media that was published before the mid-1990s (where the book was held by the library but was not available on Google Books or the Amazon Kindle store); or (b) a journal article on the topic of new media that was published in the early 1980s (where the journal print run was held by the library but had never been digitized by the publisher). (In fact, one clue to my students that the resource was only available in print and not online was whether or not it came up as a physical resale item on eBay!) Either way, this meant a venture into the library stacks, a geography with which most of my students were startlingly unfamiliar:<br />
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"The next thing I knew, I was wandering deep into the stacks of Memorial Library alone in the dark. At first it was scary, but then I realized how many fascinating books our school has that I never knew about. Before I even began looking for the book I was searching for, I started picking up random books. Some dated as far back as 1865. I was amazed with what our libraries offer."</blockquote>
The OCR step was also challenging for students, in a way I didn't suspect. Our university is well-stocked with computer labs which make full software packages available for free to students, including the Adobe Creative Suite, which includes the full version of Adobe Acrobat, which includes an OCR module. But many students were not aware of this, and did not turn to their nearest computer lab, or to the DoIT help desk, for assistance with finding an OCR solution. Instead, several attempted to download their own random OCR software, and were often frustrated by the limitations of these trial versions (only OCRing one page, for example). Others managed to find a free cloud service which allowed them to upload the image and get an OCR'd text file returned to them, but were dismayed by the poor quality of the results. Even the library scanners which provide OCR directly proved difficult to use. As one student reported,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"It turns out, there are many different kinds of scanners in the library, which the librarians and myself were clearly unaware of. The technical assistant [who the librarian called in to help] pointed me to a different scanner with a touch screen explaining step-by-step instructions to convert my text into a searchable PDF."</blockquote>
The last step, posting to MyWebSpace, was the only step where we gave the students explicit step-by-step instructions. Not surprisingly, they reported no difficulty with this step. That's a shame, I think; I now suspect if they had been forced to seek out the MyWebSpace instructions on their own, they would have had a richer learning experience. Even so, most of my students reported that they had never used MyWebSpace before (or even heard of it) and some even indicated that they might use it again in the future.<br />
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So was the assignment a success? Yes. Besides introducing them to a whole series of physical and virtual information tools on campus at once, there were several spin-off benefits. A number of students commented that this assignment made them consider all of the work that it takes, behind the scenes, to deliver the seemingly friction-free flow of internet information to them with their daily Google searches and Wikipedia browsings:<br />
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"It is because of processes like this that so much information can be obtained online, but at the same time many people forget all of the hard work that makes the Internet what it is today and function properly."</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"I think this process shows how technological processes are extremely difficult to those [who] have never done them." </blockquote>
As a scholar who researches the history and geography of "information labor," I was delighted to see this insight emerge from the assignment.<br />
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Other students seemed to discover that the world of print was not only still in existence, but potentially useful as well:<br />
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"This assignment has showed that there is an abundance of useful information out there that is not on the Internet." </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"I thought that everything was digitized these days and that no one relied solely on print anymore." </blockquote>
It's one step away from this insight to involving students in a discussion of the long history, and ongoing relevance, of "print culture" in global society.<br />
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Another student expressed surprise and concern that an out-of-date, early-1990s book on "the Internet" was nevertheless not legally in the public domain:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"I think that even though this book was only published in 1993, 18 years ago, and nowhere near the 1923 cutoff for books that anyone can access for free, it should fall into the same category as the almost 100-year-old books because the information is, for the most part, useless. [...] There is no reason for anyone to buy this book anymore and no reason why it shouldn't be available to anyone who might want to read it online."</blockquote>
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This insight nicely operationalized the "fair use" and "public domain" discussion we had conducted in class just the week before.<br />
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Finally, a number of students commented on how they never, never wanted to rely on physical information again:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"From now on I truly will appreciate the access to information I have through the Internet." </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"in doing this assignment, it made me appreciate how lucky I am to have not only the internet at my disposal, but the machines to put print into the digital world."</blockquote>
Even for these digital enthusiasts, this little exercise proved to be a highly effective "digital divide" lesson, by starting from the "wired" side of the digital divide and forcing students to experience the "offline" world of information and communication. <br />
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I'll be doing it again next year, for certain.<br />
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</blockquote>Greg Downeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09154543464555817869noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38418152.post-59986845634269018512012-03-01T11:08:00.002-06:002012-03-01T11:17:38.680-06:00On hybrid courses, blended learning, online instruction, and educational innovationToday and tomorrow I'm going to be part of a panel considering the topic of “Online and Blended Learning” sponsored by our DoIT Academic Technology professionals and our Division of Continuing Studies. I thought I might post some links and examples here to accompany my presentation.<br /><br />I actually started using "blended" or "hybrid" approaches to learning -- or techniques which incorporate online experiences into traditional classroom lecture and discussion work, usually (but not always) time-shifting and/or place-shifting the delivery of faculty instruction and student participation -- in most of my "regular" or "face-to-face" courses starting in the early 2000s. Although our university makes available many different kinds of academic technology and courseware resources, I began incorporating online experiences into my teaching when free external collaborative weblog, wiki, and document services started to be available on the Web. Over the last decade I've experimented with four main courses in this mode, and (hopefully) learned something different from each one.<br />
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<a href="http://www.journalism.wisc.edu/~gdowney/courses/j201/index.php">J 201 - Introduction to Mass Communication</a> (4 credits, Comm-B)<br />
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My first large-scale experience with these tools was in the undergraduate lecture/discussion course, J 201 "Introduction to Mass Communication." This course serves several different purposes. As the title indicates, is an introductory service course for students interested in all aspects of the mass communication industries. It is also a required course for entry into the competitive School of Journalism & Mass Communication undergraduate major. And it is a course that meets the Comm-B requirement for instruction in research skills, oral communication skills, and, especially, written communication skills. The four hundred or so students who enroll in J 201 each semester choose the course for a combination of these three purposes, I'd guess.<br /><br />As you might expect, there's lots going on in J 201. It is a four-credit course with three 50-minute lectures per week, and one 75-minute, TA-led discussion section. For the faculty member, monitoring a dozen or so TAs -- ensuring consistency of teaching, learning and grading across discussion sections -- is an additional challenge. There are weekly written quizzes, two in-class exams, a final exams, and lots and lots of writing and speaking assignments. And we've wrapped various digital tools into the course as we've gone along, including using rich media in lecture, having students evaluate online information sources, and experimenting with student-produced video podcasts.<br /><br />And we also started using online collaborative tools for blended/hybrid education in J 201, for three reasons: (1) to expose our students to some of the platforms "out there in the world" as part of the course material itself; (2) to find more efficient ways of handling student work in order to cut down on the time burdens of managing the course; and (3) to make that student work visible to myself and the rest of the TAs so that we could learn from each others' experiences and help ensure consistency across sections. <br /><br />The first blended/hybrid tool we tried in J201 was a weblog service, Blogger. This is a free service (owned by Google) which allows the creation of unlimited weblogs, allows either public weblogs or private password-protected spaces, and does not include advertising. We signed up students into discussion-section-specific blogs and used it as a platform for writing about and then discussing the two scholarly articles that students had to read each week as part of the normal coursework. This writing could take place asynchronously and aspatially from the discussion section; students could participate from any computer with a web browser, at any time of the day or night. Having students rehearse their reading summaries and critiques beforehand helped us have better in-person discussions in sections -- and we stressed this important link between the online world and the in-person activity. But we had to make clear what we were asking of students, especially at the beginning, telling them "write 250 words in your blog post" or "respond with a comment of at least 150 words" in order to set a good pattern for participation. And we had to mandate that students completed their blog posts at least 24 hours before section, in order to give time for replies -- otherwise we'd get blog posts literally minutes before section was to begin. We were surprised to find that for most of our students -- who ranged from first-year students to seniors -- this was their very first experience at authoring a blog post. <br /><br />The second blended/hybrid tool we tried was a wiki service, PBWorks. Again, this free service allows us to create unlimited wikis, either open to the Web or walled off as we choose, with no advertising. We used discussion-section-specific wikis along with the three four-page writing tasks that we assigned each semester. Students each created their own wiki page and posted the rough draft of each assignment to the wiki. Then, fellow students were assigned to read these rough drafts and write substantive comments and critique on that same wiki page. (Again, we had to mandate a certain word length to ensure proper participation.) As with the blog platform, we were surprised to discover that most of our students had never used a wiki before, so that was a good learning experience for them. We also made sure to stress the relationships between online writing and writing for print; the final drafts were not posted to the wiki, but printed out and handed in traditionally. We found this was necessary to bring the appropriate level of seriousness and completion to the final draft; it became "real" (and was treated by the student as a document to be carefully proofread) when it was printed out. But the main benefit from this wiki system was logistical: it allowed the instructor and TAs to get a bird's-eye glimpse of writing topics and skills and ideas from across a very large course, and to trade exemplars of both well-written papers and common writing mistakes.<br />
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<a href="https://mywebspace.wisc.edu/gdowney/courses/lis201/web/index.html">LIS 201 - The Information Society</a> (4 credits, Comm-B)<br />
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In Fall 2007 I had an opportunity to propose a new undergraduate course for my second department, Library & Information Studies, which would work very much along the lines of J 201 as described above. It would be a large-lecture course with TAs, covering an introductory topic, and incorporating the Comm-B requirements. But in order to find TA funding for this course, I designed it for a competition on "distance education" experimentation as a blended/hybrid course. In Fall 2008 I first began teaching this course, LIS 201 - The Information Society.<br /><br />In LIS 201 I incorporated the same weblog and wiki features as with J 201 -- online discussions and online peer review of writing work. But we also went farther, actually pulling out one hour of face-to-face instructor contact and replacing it with more in-depth online work. This made sense in terms of the course content -- considering the impacts of information technology on social, political, economic, and cultural life over the last century or so -- but also in terms of student scheduling. After all, this was a brand-new undergraduate course in a department, Library & Information Studies, that does not actually have an undergraduate major. What would motivate students to take it? We hoped that the subject matter would be attractive, and that the Comm-B training would also be a draw. But by making this four-credit course accessible to students through one 75-minute lecture per week and one 75-minute discussion per week, we hoped to create a more flexible scheduling solution that students could fit more easily into their busy schedules.<br /><br />The online experiences that we developed for that final hour of class time started out as "traditional" narrated slideshow lectures produced by the professor (me). But I quickly tired of this technique; I feared that students weren't engaging with these canned presentations. Instead, we shifted gears and turned the online hour into a different kind of active assignment each week, always ending in a blog-based collaborative discussion of the experience. Basically, we were creating a mini online laboratory activity and a mini online discussion section to go along with it. Some of the topics we've used were:<ul>
<li>Search the <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/prelinger">Prelinger Archives</a> for telecommunications-related films (telephone, telegraph, etc.) and find the most interesting vintage film for a 21st century class on the "information society" that you can.</li>
<li>Do a geodemographic marketing analysis on yourself, by searching online for data about the place where you live which someone might ascribe to you, starting with the <a href="http://factfinder.census.gov/">US Census</a>.</li>
<li>Pick a term relating to the modern information society — "world wide web" or "computer" or "cell phone" or "digital divide" or ... well, use your imagination — and try to find the earliest journalistic use of this term in three different historical newspaper databases provided by ProQuest: the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times.</li>
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Here the fact that this course involves several graduate teaching assistants has been a great asset. Over the four years we've taught LIS 201, we've built a nice little rotating library of such online lab assignments, often at the suggestion or design of the TA. As with our strategy of exposing the students to blogs and wikis, we are always surprised by what we find: they tell us that they never used a library database before, or that they never Googled themselves to see what private information is openly available about them, or that they never realized that Wikipedia pages had "talk" and "history" components lurking in the background.<br />
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<a href="http://mediafluency.blogspot.com/">J 176 - Media Fluency in the Digital Age</a> (3 credits)<br />
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Just this Spring I've taken these techniques one step further in yet another hybrid/blended course experiment, J 176 - Media Fluency in the Digital Age. This is a smaller course, with only 45 students and a single TA. We meet for one 50-minute lecture on Mondays, and one 50-minute discussion section (held in a computer lab) on Wednesdays. Here, rather than using discussion section blogs and wikis for student participation, we've turned the model around. Each discussion section of 15-18 students is broken up into three groups of 5-6 students, and each of these groups is charged with creating its own online weblog over the course of the semester -- publicly available to all users of the Web -- dealing with some aspect of "media fluency". This collaborative lab work, monitored online by both the instructor and the TA, and mediated behind the scenes using collaborative Google Documents services, makes up 1/3 of the course contact time. <br /><br />Students get to choose everything about the blog that they construct, such as: the specific angle on media fluency that they will promote; the specific target market of university students that they will try to reach; and the specific blog platform that they will utilize. Over the course of the semester we ask them to flesh out their blog with RSS feeds, analytics tracking, advertising connections, Facebook promotions, an associated Twitter account, and rich media of all sorts. Once again, most of these students had never even read a blog when starting the course, let alone produced one. But while they see their own blog design, production, maintenance, and posting as the main challenge of the assignment, what we see is their use of the Google Documents services, face-to-face meetings in the computer lab, and communication between group members on the public blog itself as the real learning experience: figuring out how to use online networked rich media tools in order to effectively collaborate in a way that everyone is able to learn something new, everyone is able to contribute something unique, and everyone is pleased with the effort put in by all of their peers (no free riders).<br />
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<a href="http://interlsinternship.pbworks.com/">INTER-LS 260 - Internship in the Liberal Arts and Sciences</a> (1 credit)<br />
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My final example takes all the ideas and lessons of these blended/hybrid course experiments and moves them to a fully online course. A few years ago the College of Letters & Sciences Career Services Office identified an acute need on campus related to student internships. Many students were seeking internships in for-profit, non-profit, and government organizations around the country, not only over the summer but during the fall and spring semesters as well, but were being told that they had to link their internships to a college credit experience. Some majors have such internship courses, but many do not. How to provide a flexible internship structure for students that is low-cost (only pay for one credit) but intellectually rigorous (linking the learning outcomes of a liberal education to the world of work) and able to scale up (more than the traditional single professor mentoring a single internship student by demanding an independent study term paper at the end of the experience).<br /><br />What we came up with takes the wiki model from J 201 and LIS 201, and structures the whole class through this sort of collaborative web site. Students in INTER-LS 260 get signed up to our wiki (password-protected so employers cannot see it or Google it) and there they write up a weekly set of fieldnotes about their internship experience. We also pose specific questions to them, ask them to do some online readings, and (through collaboration with the professional advisers at L&S Career Services) provide resume design assistance. So this is an efficient way for our instructors to connect with the students and provide course materials at a distance, since students may be interning anywhere around the state, around the country, or around the world.<br /><br />But the real benefit of this collaborative online wiki-based internship course is that students get to see each others' work, read each others' field notes, and learn about each others' internship experirences. Again, we mandate that students comment on each others writings in order to get the virtual community started. But it doesn't take much to convince them of the value of this social network, especially in an internship situation that can feel overwhelming and isolating -- away from family, friends, and school. The reading, writing, and critical thinking work that the students do online certainly meets the one-credit requirement of the course. But interestingly, students report that they feel like they're doing a lot more work in our course than even in some of their more traditional three-credit courses. Thankfully, though, this does not sour them on the experience; at the end they have a written record of all that they've accomplished, and a way to articulate the value of their internship experience for their next employer. So in this case, I believe the online tools we use not only make the class feasible in the first place, they are what make it a desirable learning experience at all.<br /><br /><br /><br />Greg Downeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09154543464555817869noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38418152.post-67266748158510370452011-12-02T08:17:00.001-06:002011-12-02T08:22:31.519-06:00Pedal power<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />Greg Downeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09154543464555817869noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38418152.post-14553857138713176502011-09-12T06:01:00.001-05:002011-09-12T11:06:32.968-05:00On anniversaries, in the media and in our lives(Originally I posted this to my <a href="http://blog.journalism.wisc.edu/">collective departmental blog</a>, but it's more appropriate on a site that I take full responsibility for myself, I think.)<br />
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Like many of you, I've paid close attention to some of the media retrospectives on the ten year anniversary of the tragedy of September 11, 2001, and I've intentionally ignored others. I've managed to avoid seeing those film clips of the twin towers falling again, but somehow I keep hearing replays of the aftermath sound bites from then-President George W. Bush. I listened to a bit of the NPR coverage this Sunday morning, and skimmed most of a New York Review of Books essay, but I declined to take a free copy of my hometown Wisconsin State Journal, with its commemorative cover page. For me, I guess, 9/11 is less something that happened ten years ago, and more something that is still happening today — in the form of an economic crisis across the globe, two frustratingly complicated wars that have yet to end, and ongoing news reports, almost weekly, of anti-Islam, or anti-Middle Eastern, or anti-Arab, or anti-anybody-who-looks-like-my-Hollywood-movie-idea-of-a-terrorist prejudice here in the US.<br />
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We all personalize such global media events, I think. (And I mean no disrespect in calling 9/11 and its ongoing aftermath a "global media event" — after all, terrorism is by definition meant to grab headlines, soundbites, and video clips, in order to inspire fear and provoke a response; wars against terrorism, whether noble, misguided, or both, are inevitably waged with marketing campaigns alongside, and seem to wind down only when public-opinion polls turn negative.) This anniversary is all the more difficult for me because, like many of my friends at UW-Madison, it is also the tenth anniversary of my first semester on campus as a teacher and researcher. September 2001 was the first month of my first "real" faculty job, in the new career in public service education that I had chosen several years earlier (and not without a great amount of anxiety) over the private corporate ladder.<br />
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The academic decisions that I made in the hours, days, weeks, and years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks — with much assistance, advice, and inspiration from my colleagues — still stay with me. Do we continue teaching courses on the day of the disaster? (We did, but we allowed students to go home to be with friends and family.) Do we work these events into our syllabi that semester, even in courses without a direct connection to the topic? (Absolutely, though hopefully we did so without dogma and prejudice.) Do we return to the event each year or do we let it fade from memory? (We keep it alive, though with each new class comes the realization that our students were younger and younger on that horrible day.)<br />
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The events before, during, and after September 11 became a regular part of my syllabus for "Introduction to mass communication," in a series of lectures and readings that slowly morphed from "Media responses to tragedy" to "Media engagement with war". The research project that I was working on for most of this period, an historical study of the human/machine practice of automated stenography, ended up being grounded by an introductory vignette of the ways that live television closed-captioners dealt with the non-stop news cycle on 9/11. And the final unit of my newest course, "The information society," now deals with the threat of "cyberwar" and the constantly-changing definitions of terror and justice in a world with both robotic Predator drones and crowdsourced Wikileaks archives.<br />
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It seems almost inappropriate for me to use this forum to call on my friends and colleagues to remember this day, to honor those who were lost, and respect those who continue to work for a better, more peaceful world ten years later. Other leaders, activists, and writers will call on us to remember these things with much more grace, authority, and power than I can. But maybe I can call on readers of this blog post to simply offer their own perspectives on how that day ten years ago ended up changing their work as academics — or their work as students — and how it again may inspire us to change our curriculum and our university for the better. We still need such ideas, more than ever.Greg Downeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09154543464555817869noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38418152.post-42770624011585087072011-08-10T07:57:00.000-05:002011-08-10T07:57:57.845-05:00Brief thoughts on the Wisconsin recall electionsSix hugely expensive and energetic state Senate recall elections took place yesterday in Wisconsin; two more remain to go next week. Result so far? The state where I live, work, spend, vote, pay taxes, donate money, volunteer my time, and raise my children is still extremely polarized, and too often aggressively, intolerantly so -- but in the state Senate, at least, it is also slightly more balanced between those two poles. If I were an optimist, I'd hope that both sides might now better work together to develop effective governing policy for all citizens (not just their paying campaign supporters), through responsible and constructive political compromise (where citizens are given time to understand and comment on legislative proposals, and legislators are compelled to follow proper procedure in debating and voting on them), rather than a situation where the current side holding power demolishes those same structures of governance and compromise (such as democratic worker unions, checks on corporate campaign spending, and competitive electoral districts) simply to preserve their own power position. <br />
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Today I choose to be an optimist, and to imagine better.Greg Downeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09154543464555817869noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38418152.post-68495543637402241752011-07-13T07:36:00.009-05:002011-07-13T14:05:23.118-05:00More helpful hints for deciding "What are the consequences?" and "What do they mean?"A few months ago, during the height of the debate across Wisconsin about our Governor's then-proposed "budget repair bill," I wrote an informal blog post entitled <a href="http://noteonmydoor.blogspot.com/2011/02/helpful-hints-for-deciding-what-is.html">Helpful hints for deciding “What is happening?” and “Where do I stand?”</a> in which I detailed one example of how an interested student, activist, worker, or citizen might wade through the complex and contradictory media environment in order to learn about the context, meaning, and ramifications of this bill -- and hopefully come to some informed, if provisional, opinion on its merit. I was surprised and pleased to see that my little blog post circulated not only through my own civic and intellectual community here in Madison, but across the state and beyond. (Just this week I found out that it will be used as part of an exercise in a media literacy course up in the Twin Cities next semester.)<br />
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Today, after a long but historic season of public protests and political maneuvers which brought out both the best and the worst of our system of governance, both the budget repair bill and the larger budget bill that it heralded are now law. The media discourse has subsequently shifted into two new parallel tracks. One of these tracks builds directly on the first: it follows the continued public action and political posturing as Wisconsin works through an <a href="http://host.madison.com/ct/news/local/govt-and-politics/capitol-report/article_06bf5ac0-ad12-11e0-881c-001cc4c002e0.html">unprecedented series of recall elections</a> targeting both Democratic and Republican state legislators in various districts across the state -- districts that are themselves now subject to <a href="http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/govt-and-politics/article_253f1968-abff-11e0-b1fb-001cc4c002e0.html">accelerated and, arguably, partisan redistricting proposals</a> by the current Republican legislative majority. But the other track is new, as it deals with the short-term and long-term consequences of the new laws themselves. In short, are they working? And if so, for whom?<br />
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This is not merely an academic question. The degree to which voters will be motivated to participate in recall elections -- in this round or in future rounds next year, for or against incumbents -- depends on how they feel that they, or their interests, or their families, or their neighbors, or their communities have been affected by the many new service cuts, corporate subsidies, local government restrictions and collective bargaining dilutions mandated by the two budget bills. Our local media is charged with seeking out and representing those community reactions and examples -- and with doing the difficult work of fairly and proportionately representing them back to the rest of us, rather than engaging in easy "one side said this, and the other side said that" equivalencies. Our regional and national media are similarly charged with putting our local situations into wider context, demonstrating how success stories in one site might connect to stories of greater hardship in another site, in complex and even contradictory ways. In other words, we still need to follow this story -- and we may still need some tools and tricks in order to follow it carefully and thoroughly enough to come to our own decisions about "What are the consequences?" and "What do they mean?"<br />
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This need was brought home to me last week when a friend of mine from Illinois -- I think it's fair to classify her as an "independent" and "moderate" -- forwarded to me a link to an online article she had read about our situation in Wisconsin. It was written by <a href="http://washingtonexaminer.com/people/byron-york">Byron York</a> of the <i><a href="http://washingtonexaminer.com/">Washington Examiner</a></i>. The headline? "<a href="http://washingtonexaminer.com/politics/2011/06/union-curbs-rescue-wisconsin-school-district">Union curbs rescue a Wisconsin school district.</a>" Here, in part, is what the article claimed:<br />
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<blockquote>Now the bill is law, and we have some very early evidence of how it is working. And for one beleaguered Wisconsin school district, it's a godsend, not a disaster.<br />
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The Kaukauna School District, in the Fox River Valley of Wisconsin near Appleton, has about 4,200 students and about 400 employees. It has struggled in recent times and this year faced a deficit of $400,000. But after the law went into effect, at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday, school officials put in place new policies they estimate will turn that $400,000 deficit into a $1.5 million surplus. And it's all because of the very provisions that union leaders predicted would be disastrous.</blockquote><br />
My friend simply asked me "what's missing from this account?" which struck me as exactly the right question to ask about this, or any, claim of success or failure of the Wisconsin budget bills. My reaction when reading something like this is usually to break it down by (a) who's reported it, (b) what's the source of the report, (c) what's missing from the report, and (d) what are the implications of the report if it is true. What follows is my own path in trying to answer these questions.<br />
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(a) <b>Who reported it?</b> My quick web search (yes, including a <a href="http://www.wikipedia.org/">Wikipedia</a> query) indicates that the <i>Washington Examiner</i> is owned by the same parent company as the <i><a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/">Weekly Standard</a></i>; both are clearly marketed as conservative media outlets. The columnist, Byron York, was previously a writer for the <i><a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/">National Review</a></i> (a well-known journal of conservative political thought) and published a book in 2005 titled <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Vast-Left-Wing-Conspiracy-Democrats/dp/1400082390/">The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy</a></i>. So from the outset, I wouldn't expect either this newspaper or this opinion columnist to be favorable to the cause of WI union members -- just as I wouldn't expect a partisan columnist writing at the <i><a href="http://www.thenation.com/">Nation</a></i>, a well-known journal of progressive political thought, to be favorable to Governor Walker. (That doesn't mean that I would dismiss something written in either the <i>Washington Examiner</i> or the <i>Nation</i> on this basis; for full disclosure, I subscribe to the <i>Nation</i> and find it to be mostly very insightful and informative. But it's usually good to know at the outset whether a journalist self-affiliates with a particular worldview or cause, and whether a particular article or news outlet generally fits in with the political assumptions of its target audience, or challenges them.) <br />
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(b) <b>What's the source of the report?</b> As far as I can tell, the column does not represent any original reporting at all, but is simply a summary of a <a href="http://wispolitics.com/index.iml?Article=240769">press release from the Kaukauna school district</a>, which hit the internet three days before and was promoted by the district's Republican state representative Jim Steineke, a self-described Tea Party candidate who wants to abolish the corporate income tax, among other positions. (A <a href="http://www.google.com/">Google</a> search of some of the keywords in the original report led me quickly to the press release.) I could find no information on whether the majority of the school board members who set this policy and issued the press release are Tea Party members or progressives, but that would be something interesting to seek out.<br />
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(c) <b>What's missing?</b> Given the outlet and the source, it's not surprising to me that neither the column in the <i>Examiner</i> nor the original press release explores what teachers, residents, or students say about the issue. A <a href="http://news.google.com/">Google News</a> search of the rather unique keyword "<a href="http://news.google.com/news/search?aq=f&pz=1&cf=all&ned=us&hl=en&q=Kaukauna&btnmeta_news_search=Search+News">Kaukauna</a>" led me to other press reports on the district's situation. I found <a href="http://www.nbc26.com/news/local/124747419.html">one report from a Green Bay television station</a> that mentioned briefly the teacher reaction. The teacher quoted points to the lack of prep time when teachers are expected to handle more classes. The <a href="http://www.postcrescent.com/article/20110629/APC0101/110629072/Story-documents-Kaukauna-schools-project-1-5M-surplus-after-changes?odyssey=tab|topnews|img|FRONTPAGE"><i>Appleton Post-Crescent</i> report on the story</a> includes the interesting tidbit that "In April, the school board rejected a proposal from the Kaukauna Education Association [the union] to extend the union’s contract and incorporate pension and healthcare concessions along with a wage freeze, a move the union projected could save the district about $1.8 million next year." (I find it interesting that $1.8 million is greater than $1.5 million.) The best contextual summary I could find was at the <a href="http://www.jsonline.com/blogs/news/124821374.html?page=1"><i>Milwaukee Journal Sentinel</i> website</a> which made it clear that across all of Wisconsin, 410 out of the state's 424 school districts will receive less money under the whole budget plan, and the Governor's budget even prevents local communities from voting their own property tax increases. Here in Madison, the <i>Wisconsin State Journal</i> (if anything, a "moderate" news source, branded against the overtly "progressive" <i>Capital Times</i>) <a href="http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/education/local_schools/article_a364c244-a3ed-11e0-9ec9-001cc4c002e0.html">detailed the cuts to our school district</a> and reminded readers that we in Madison were in no way "bloated" to begin with, as four years ago we had been cut even more.<br />
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(d) <b>What if it's true?</b> In other words, how do we interpret the reported effects back in Kaukauna? This is perhaps the hardest question, and I've saved it for last. We can get part of the answer from current media reports, but a fuller analysis demands deeper investigation -- reading a book on the history or current working of the education system (a good start might be Diane Ravitch's <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Death-Great-American-School-System/dp/0465014917/">The Death and Life of the Great American School System</a></i>), or talking to some education professionals themselves (such as the folks at our own <a href="http://www.wcer.wisc.edu/">Wisconsin Center for Education Research</a>). My take is based on nearly two decades of graduate education and university work in which issues of public education have continually connected with my own research and teaching -- in other words, consider me not an "expert" but an "informed layperson." Like many taxpayers and parents, at first glance I think that creating smaller class sizes and saving public money both sound great. But with the same amount of teachers, working longer hours and teaching more periods during the day, how is this not simply a work speedup and a wage cut? Teachers aren't assembly line workers. They're not performing unskilled labor at the rhythm of a machine that can be tweaked to get a better quota with less cost. Teachers are supposedly the ones who have the education, training, and experience to make decisions -- together -- about the best strategies for education children. School boards, though, are often comprised of politically motivated citizens, on both sides of the aisle, who are elected by very small groups of highly partisan voters and are often bringing ideological agendas to the table (like debates over the teaching of evolution in the classroom). Personally, based on what I know about the public education system and what I know from teachers I've met in my career, I'd rather trust the judgment of the teachers when it comes to structuring the school day and making educational curriculum and staffing decisions. But in any case, if you cut teacher wages and increase their hours, you're making it a less attractive job. You will get what you pay for, in the end -- just like the free market theory would predict. And if your goal is the privatization of public school education, as is the stated goal of most Tea Party groups that I've looked at, well, you've just taken a significant step toward that. So my tentative assessment? There's much more to this story, and to call out any such dramatic "success" is, at best, premature.<br />
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You may not share this conclusion. That's understandable if your own experience, your own circle of experts that you trust, and your own intellectual background is different than my own. Having an effective and responsible media doesn't demand that we all agree. But it does demand that we talk to each other rather than past each other, that we understand different perspectives rather than dismissing them, and that we wrestle with serious evidence and analysis rather than accepting easy "common sense" assumptions or solutions. Good media outlets -- like good schools and universities -- dig for that evidence and work through that analysis, forcing us to challenge each other (and ourselves). Poor media outlets give us the answers we already think we know, served up with a generous side-order of flattery. <br />
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No matter what you might have imagined would happen after these budget bills were signed, I hope this brief blog post helps you find your way through the many complex and, yes, contradictory results that the media will both report and ignore over the next few months. It's an important story for the audiences to demand that the analysts follow.Greg Downeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09154543464555817869noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38418152.post-38382936047113951982011-02-20T20:51:00.026-06:002011-07-13T08:21:52.908-05:00Helpful hints for deciding “What is happening?” and “Where do I stand?”Many of us who work here at UW-Madison -- faculty, staff, and graduate students -- have participated to one degree or another in the Capitol Square protests against Governor Walker's proposed budget repair bill. (Full disclosure: I showed up a couple of times, bringing my kids on Thursday and honking my ridiculous bicycle horn quite loudly on Saturday). Individual reasons for discomfort with this bill vary. Some oppose the notion that a "shared sacrifice" during a state financial crisis should translate simply to more cuts in remuneration for public service employees while businesses get tax breaks at the same time. Others are concerned about the speed at which this legislation has been proposed, without any consultation with public service employee representatives (especially labor unions). What unites much of the bill's opposition are its provisions for dismantling both the legal rights and the practical abilities of public employees to collectively organize and democratically negotiate their wages, benefits, and working conditions. This is why so many individuals who are not themselves directly affected by the bill's provisions -- including both firefighters and police officers, both union and non-union workers, both public and private employees -- have united to pack the Capitol Rotunda and surrounding grounds for days on end.<br />
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However, for many UW-Madison students, witnessing this drama playing out on and around their college campus, the situation may seem bewildering or even exasperating. Students may have to deal with classes that are moved, postponed, cancelled or reformulated on short notice in response to rapidly shifting circumstances. Students may be unused to seeing their instructors shed their more customary classroom personas of "disinterested observer" or "omniscient narrator" for a more activist position in a complicated political debate. And students may simply wonder, without ever articulating it for fear of seeming out of touch, "What is happening?"<br />
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To me, the ability to fearlessly ask that basic question of "What is happening?" -- together with its normative follow-up, "Where do I stand?" -- represents the very reason that one spends precious years and precious dollars attending a university in the first place. This week, I and many of my fellow instructors have been using the current political-economic debate in Wisconsin as a "teachable moment" in classes ranging from mass communication to political science, women's studies to geography. But what about students who aren't wrestling with these issues in class right now? What kind of advice can we as UW instructors offer to students who are trying to figure out "What is happening?" and "Where do I stand?" on their own?<br />
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Rather than try to explain my own position on these two questions, I thought I might offer a list of strategies for developing your own views on the current crisis. Through the networked digital information infrastructure of the Web, college students in the early 21st century are privileged to have access to more media voices, more first-person accounts, more background data, and more historical context than ever before. Using these resources effectively, however, requires care, skill, and practice. Here are some guidelines that I follow in my own media diet, with selected but incomplete examples, that I hope will be helpful to you.<br />
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<b>1. Start with a summary from a trusted national news source.</b> Most of the information that circulates on social networking services like Facebook or Twitter, or that gets reposted and excerpted on blogs and news aggregators, still comes from professional journalists working for newspapers and magazines, television and radio stations, and online news sites. When an issue has both large-scale and local implications such as our Wisconsin budget debate, I like to start with a national newspaper like the New York Times, a national broadcaster like CNN, or a national public-service media outlet like National Public Radio. For example, Michael Cooper and Katharine Q. Seelye's New York Times article "<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/19/us/politics/19states.html">Wisconsin leads the way as workers fight state cuts</a>" (18 Feb 2011) succinctly explains the issues at stake: "Governor Walker's plan would limit collective bargaining for most state and local government employees to wages, barring them from negotiating on issues like benefits and work conditions. It would also require workers to contribute more to their pension and health care plans, cap wage increases based on the Consumer Price Index and limit contracts to one year. And it would take on the power of unions by requiring them to take annual votes to maintain certification, and by permitting workers to stop paying union dues. Police and fire unions, which have some of the most expensive benefits but who supported Mr. Walker's campaign for governor, are exempted."<br />
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<b>2. Continue by exploring local and regional news sources.</b> For an issue dealing with UW-Madison, our two student newspapers (the Badger Herald and the Daily Cardinal) are great local starting points. But professional papers are still the best source for pieces written by full-time journalists who have spent years cultivating connections to local sources and developing a thorough understanding of the diverse local culture. I start with the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, the Wisconsin State Journal, the Capital Times, and the Isthmus. For example, in the Capital Times, longtime area business reporter Mike Ivey provides some crucial background on our current budget woes: "Former Gov. Jim Doyle was able to reduce the deficit then through a combination of furloughs for state workers, increases to the cigarette tax, a move to combined reporting for corporate tax collections and a boost in income taxes for those in the upper bracket. The state was also helped by $1.3 billion in one-time federal stimulus funding. Moreover, state tax collections have continued to rise as the economy recovers. In January, the state collected $1.46 billion in revenue, up 7.1 percent from a year ago. And Wisconsin's unemployment rate of 7.5 percent is better than the 9 percent for the U.S. as a whole. While the state has lost thousands of manufacturing jobs, the recession has not hit as hard here as other places." ("<a href="http://host.madison.com/ct/news/local/govt-and-politics/article_90196216-3b66-11e0-a327-001cc4c03286.html">Analysis: Despite budget woes, state less in crisis now than two years ago</a>," 18 Feb 2011)<br />
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<b>3. Dive into the detail.</b> Once you've got the basic story, find some longer narrative or analysis pieces to bring more detail to the picture. Look for eyewitness accounts. Find unusual angles. Pay special attention to articles that set the story in context, comparing it to previous historical moments, to other events happening elsewhere around the world, or to similar issues with comparable stakes. These pieces often come from weekly long-form culture and news magazines like the New Yorker, the Atlantic, or the New Republic -- news organizations that can better disregard the demands of a daily (or hourly) news cycle deadline and focus on longer-term reporting. For example:<br />
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<ul><li><b>Follow the money and the power.</b> Many times stories taking an investigative journalism angle will come from the partisan or alternative press -- that is, news outlets that transparently (and proudly) declare their own editorial position, such as "fearless watchdogging of the powerful" on the left or "free markets and free ideas" on the right. The news magazine Mother Jones ran a piece by Andy Kroll ("<a href="http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/02/wisconsin-scott-walker-koch-brothers">Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker: Funded by the Koch Bro</a>s," 18 Feb 2011) which charged that "Charles and David Koch are conservative titans of industry who have infamously used their vast wealth to undermine President Obama and fight legislation they detest, such as the cap-and-trade climate bill, the health care reform act, and the economic stimulus package. [...] Koch Industries' political action committee has doled out more than $2.6 million to candidates. And one prominent beneficiary of the Koch brothers' largess is Scott Walker."</li>
<li><b>Unpack the numbers and the language.</b> An early Associated Press report from 10 February 2011 (Scott Bauer, "<a href="http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9LA7K102.htm">Walker to strip most union rights</a>") largely relied on the budget numbers put forth by the Governor's own office, reporting that "cuts are necessary to avoid up to 1,500 state employee layoffs. The state faces a $137 million budget shortfall in the fiscal year that ends June 30." But a later editorial from the Capital Times ("<a href="http://host.madison.com/ct/news/opinion/editorial/article_61064e9a-27b0-5f28-b6d1-a57c8b2aaaf6.html">Walker gins up 'crisis' to reward cronies</a>," 26 Feb 2011) argued that "To the extent that there is an imbalance -- Walker claims there is a $137 million deficit -- it is not because of a drop in revenues or increases in the cost of state employee contracts, benefits or pensions. It is because Walker and his allies pushed through $140 million in new spending for special-interest groups in January. If the Legislature were simply to rescind Walker's new spending schemes -- or delay their implementation until they are offset by fresh revenues -- the 'crisis' would not exist." Seemingly objective numbers are actually quite contested in this story. Similarly, whether one refers to the Capitol Square protestors as "thugs and rioters" or "peaceful demonstrators" casts a spin over an entire news report. Watch out for such fighting words.</li>
<li><b>Understand the history.</b> A recent piece in the The New Republic (Joseph A. McCain, "<a href="http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/83829/wisconsin-public-employees-walker-negotiate">What's really going on in Wisconsin?</a>," 19 Feb 2011) does a good job of setting our current debate in historical context. The author noted that "Public-sector collective bargaining arose in tandem with the civil rights movement between 1955 and 1965. This was no coincidence, as both movements were making the same point: How could the nation justify denying some citizens the rights and freedoms that it granted to others?" </li>
</ul><br />
<b>4. Question your sources.</b> Having explored the national, local, and in-depth angles of any big story, you'll no doubt encounter some differences, and maybe even some contradictions, in how the story is told. Some sources might be getting their voices out in all venues, while others seem strangely silent. Different reporters might use different terms for the event itself (was it "protest" or "intimidation"?). And even numbers represented in one article as objective facts (like budgetary projections or the results of public opinion polls) may be contested in another article. How do you decide what is true? Here are some questions you can ask of each news outlet, each reporter, and each article to help clarify how the article is meant to "work":<br />
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<ul><li><b>Does the news outlet transparently declare a particular partisan position? </b>For example, in Madison the Capital Times bills itself as "your progressive news source." In their articles you might see a greater number of sources from, say, the labor movement or the progressive grassroots. That doesn't necessarily mean that the Capital Times is "biased" or uncritical towards these sources; however, it does mean that the paper takes seriously its responsibility to help these sources participate in the debate. </li>
<li><b>Does the news outlet target a particular audience that it might either want to please or fear to alienate?</b> Except for public service media, most news sources have a very clear idea of the market segment that they are trying to reach -- in order to deliver that market segment to their advertisers -- and some may end up running more and more stories that appeal to the preexisting assumptions of their audience base. For example, the Fox News Channel bills itself as "fair and balanced," but research on its audience demonstrates that it reaches a very homogenous conservative-leaning psychographic (that is, an audience segment defined by subjective traits -- shared ideas or lifestyle -- rather than by objective demographic traits like household income, education level, or age). Similarly, MSNBC's new branding of its audience as one that "leans forward" might be part of its strategy to send Ed Schultz to Madison to run his prime-time opinion-journalism show from the center of the rallies. </li>
<li><b>Does the reporter have the experience to cover the issue critically?</b> Debates over budget legislation, economic forecasts, and the social realities of working families are complicated. Look for reporters who have a track record of dealing competently and completely with these issues, rather than reporters who are uncritically recirculating the soundbites of others. When a reporter simply reports "he said, she said" quotes to create a supposedly "balanced" article, we call this "stenography" (simply taking down what is said verbatim) rather than journalism (applying a critical filter to bring readers your best interpretation of what is happening). </li>
<li><b>Does the reporter clearly describe the sources used in an article?</b> Even the most experienced reporters need to rely on the statements of elected public officials, paid public relations professionals, and independent experts in putting together a comprehensive news article. You can't always know if these sources are telling the truth, but the reporter should give you as much information as possible in order to help you make that decision. What organization does a source represent? On behalf of whose interests does a source claim to speak? How does the source stand to lose or gain from the outcome of the debate? Watch out for the use of "anonymous sources" (sources that are not named but are described as to their expertise and position), and especially "blind anonymous sources" (unnamed sources whose positions are not even described in the article) because such sources may have their own agendas in leaking information to the press -- without being accountable to the public for their own words. </li>
<li><b>Does the story you're reading claim to be "objective" reporting, in-depth analysis, or journalistic opinion?</b> The same news outlet will usually contain all three of these types of stories. Breaking news stories receive the "just the facts" treatment, to get the known outline of the story out before the competition does, even if that leaves many questions unanswered. Later, reporters are assigned to delve into a story and bring more analysis to their pieces, which both introduces a subjective element (what the reporter thinks is happening) and allows the reporter to add a richer context (explaining why something is happening and what it means). Finally, reporters (and editorial boards) often declare their views on the issues of the day in their newspapers, news magazines, or web sites. Make sure such pieces are marked as "opinion" or "editorial" columns. Don't disregard them just because they state a clear point of view; instead, try to judge whether opinion journalists have effectively communicated to you why they are taking the stance that they claim. That's their job. </li>
</ul><br />
<b>5. Check in with the media watchdogs. </b>Many political action organizations like Media Matters for America (on the left) and Accuracy in Media (on the right) purport to watchdog both the mainstream and the partisan media for "bias" and spin. Visiting these sites can help prepare you to notice the strategic use of language, data, or emotion to frame a debate in a certain way that serves certain interests. But beware of false equivalency. The right wing charges that "liberal" news organizations have personal power agendas that skew all their reporting; the left wing charges that "conservative" news organizations target their audiences with what they want to hear for purposes of making profit, and that mainstream news organizations lack the will to aggressively question authorities who might later refuse to talk with them. For example, Media Matters argued on 18 Feb 2011 that "Fox News' coverage of the Wisconsin protests over Gov. Scott Walker's proposal to eliminate public employees' collective bargaining rights, among other things, has been marked with repeated attacks on the protesters. However, by contrast, Fox has relentlessly promoted and even encouraged viewers to participate in tea party and 'Tax Day' protests over the past few years." ("<a href="http://mediamatters.org/research/201102180015">Fox slams WI protests but cheered Tea Party protests</a>")<br />
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<b>6. Don't be distracted.</b> Side-issues, conspiracy theories, and anecdotal reports (often the fodder of the media watchdogs above!) all help round out the coverage of many news outlets, especially to jack-up page views online, but these sensational tidbits often serve to increase outrage more than they serve to increase understanding. For example, how important are one or two incidents of incivility or poor behavior at a political rally when 60,000 people behaved peacefully and appropriately? How important is a politician's personal life when it comes to an unrelated budget proposal? And does it really matter that "<a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/20/us-wisconsin-protests-beer-idUSTRE71J07L20110220">In Madison, two sides in bitter fight agree over beers</a>"? (James Kelleher, Reuters, 29 Feb 2011). Make sure you're not simply helping a news outlet build buzz and audience by repeating and reposting the most salacious or silly bits of gossip about a news story.<br />
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<b>7. See what Wikipedia says.</b> Yep, I'm a professor and I'm telling you it's OK to use Wikipedia. You might even use it as a starting point in your investigation into an issue. A well-written Wikipedia article has all the same strengths of a well-written piece of journalism: it summarizes the issue, it sets the issue in context, and it clearly identifies its sources. I often use Wikipedia articles not for their conclusions, but for their list of "see also" web sites and news reports at the bottom of the page. See if you think their "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Wisconsin_budget_protests">2011 Wisconsin budget protests</a>" article is useful.<br />
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<b>8. See what your social network says.</b> Now that you've done your own background reading on the issue, Facebook and Twitter can be great resources to see if you've found the same reports that others have, or if you've followed a trail of journalism that's rather unique. Trading the best news you've found through tweets or status updates is a nice way to let others benefit from the thorough research and reading that you've done. And opening your media diet up to criticism from your social networking community ("you're citing that media outlet!?") is a good way to enter into a critical conversation about journalism with a trusted group of friends. And check out Kristian Knutsen's "<a href="http://www.thedailypage.com/daily/article.php?article=32233">A guide to social media campaigns against Scott Walker's agenda for Wisconsin unions</a>" (Isthmus, 13 Feb 2011) to see how one side is mobilizing this resource.<br />
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<b>9. See what your instructors say.</b> Out of modesty I've left this one for nearly last, but really, your university teachers have a wealth of insight and experience with complicated public issues that often doesn't get to come out in structured classroom settings. But if you start asking critical questions of them -- in class or outside of class -- I guarantee that they'll rise to the occasion and help you think things through. Some instructors might be hesitant to reveal their own positions on divisive issues for fear of alienating students who hold differing views; others will gladly hold forth in spirited debate, if you encourage them. (I'm somewhere in the middle, personally.) But if you ask, they can help. You may even change some minds yourself (it's happened to me).<br />
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<b>10. Finally, go see for yourself.</b> We're incredibly lucky that so many important issues unfold right in our own backyard here in Madison. But don't think that eyewitness experience automatically substitutes for thoughtful research. The two should challenge and complement each other in building your understanding.<br />
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In the end, I think all of this media research -- both answering your initial questions and (most likely) inspiring new ones -- comes down to one thing: What kind of future do you want to see? In any given debate, think about which side is offering a better (or any) vision of tomorrow. How desirable is that future? How feasible is it? And how willing would you be to sacrifice and fight for it? Because that's really what's at stake in every political battle -- not which past we all agree on, but which future we will build together.Greg Downeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09154543464555817869noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38418152.post-79436991436023299142011-02-13T09:52:00.003-06:002011-02-13T10:02:46.122-06:00On public employees and the right to organizeWith the dramatic budget proposal issued from the Wisconsin governor's office this week, I find that as a knowledge-worker employed to research and to teach -- or to "sift and winnow," we like to say around here -- I am motivated to write a short public piece about my own reactions to these budget proposals. I write from my personal position as both a state worker and a UW-Madison professor. Please remember that my views are my own, and not necessarily those of my department, my college, or my peers.<br />
<br />
When I first joined UW-Madison as a new assistant professor in 2001, I also joined the <a href="http://wi.aft.org/ufas/">United Faculty and Academic Staff</a> labor organization -- an independent affiliate of the <a href="http://www.aft.org/">American Federation of Teachers</a> -- even though, at that time, faculty at UW-Madison weren't officially represented by a union and didn't have the right to organize (as granted by the state of WI). Why would I voluntarily earmark a portion of my salary to an organization that didn't officially represent my interests? My own research centers around the history of human labor in highly technological settings for the production and circulation of knowledge -- something I shorthand as "<a href="http://www.journalism.wisc.edu/~gdowney/articles/Downey%20G%202003%20IRSH.pdf">information labor</a>" -- and I've seen enough historical examples of productive and ethical organizing for better working conditions and greater public visibility to believe in the importance of the right to collectively advocate for the long-term interests of labor versus the more short-term goals of capital accumulation or political reelection. But on a more personal note, I knew that through nearly a century of work in southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois, my own extended family had long benefited from the strength of labor solidarity in other industries -- from the telecommunications sector and the postal service to the dairy industry and the farm-labor coalitions of the progressive era -- and this was a history that I wanted to help uphold. Finally, something about the fact that this little almost-union had the noble goal of uniting both faculty and staff in common purpose really appealed to me the more I discovered the unfortunate administrative divisions that often, if unintentionally, serve to isolate these two categories of knowledge workers from each other at a research university. In 2009 I was elected by my departmental peers to serve as the Director of my administrative unit, and I politely informed UFAS that I would need to end my affiliation with them since I was now taking on what I considered a "management" role (at least temporarily) in a climate when actual faculty unionization might become a real possibility on campus. So I understand the need to speak from a position that recognizes interests on all sides of any particular labor negotiation. <br />
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This week our current governor has proposed to roll back nearly all of the state-granted options for meaningful democratic representation and collective bargaining with public labor organizations around Wisconsin -- apparently under the assumption that this will save money in an environment where public workers are "overcompensated." (See <a href="http://www.jsonline.com/news/statepolitics/115911379.html">this Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel article</a> for details.) I strongly disagree with the notion that state workers are a drain on the economy; rather, I point to recent research from the Economic Policy Institute -- <a href="http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/6759/">"Are Wisconsin Public Employees Over-compensated?"</a> -- that suggests "Wisconsin state and local governments pay college-educated employees 25% less in annual compensation, on average, than private employers." And in the case of university workers in particular, I think it is easy to demonstrate that the economic gains to the state -- an educated workforce, a more competent citizenry, and the direct importing of millions of dollars in research and gift funds -- entirely justify a higher budget investment from taxpayers. I'm very concerned that other options such as progressive taxation or reallocation of funds from, say, corrections (prisons) aren't being considered here -- and in fact, aren't even being discussed, by the government or the press. But that's not the issue that worries me the most at the moment.<br />
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Any changes in the amount that state workers pay for benefits should, I think, be subject to legitimate negotiation among a whole host of democratically-chosen representatives, participating at various levels of administration -- from staff labor unions and faculty senates to college boards of regents and county supervisory boards. But the governor, and apparently his political party, are proposing the abandonment of this process of negotiation and participation. It's a proposal so surprising and far-reaching that it <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/us/12unions.html">made news at the New York Times</a> this week. Personally, I think this proposal is misguided. Over my decade of paid service to UW-Madison, I've seen democracy in action every single day on campus. In every unit and every discipline, our faculty and staff are able to collaboratively prioritize, discuss, debate, and decide issues about the proper course of university education, the proper administration of always-scarce funds, and the proper rewards to hard-working peers. It's not always pretty, and it's never easy, but it's something that the whole organization holds dear; and in the end, it works. It works not because it's the most efficient way of making decisions, but because it's the most transparent and legitimate. It works because it forces those holding opposing views to express and defend them in civil and evidence-based ways. And it works because it brings a basic dignity to a process where, all too easily, those with greater power or fancier credentials or higher salaries could simply have their way. That's what I think we will lose if, as an unrelated side-effect of changing the benefits payment structure of state workers, we throw out the very possibility of collective decision-making. We will lose an important mechanism to preserve the serious and honest participation of state workers, not only in shaping the character of the organizations that they serve, but in shaping the legacy that this state leaves to its next generation of civil servants -- and citizens.Greg Downeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09154543464555817869noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38418152.post-35901038082318748132010-11-03T06:46:00.001-05:002010-11-03T08:28:32.961-05:00A brief post-election note (which works for most elections)A brief post-election note (which works for most elections): Neither side of the partisan divide got everything they wanted in this election, as far as I can tell (though one side is certainly going to claim they did, for a while at least). If you have strong beliefs about the way the world is and should be, don't hide behind an election result as an excuse to stop politely sharing -- and rationally questioning -- those beliefs. If you feel confident that you're doing important and beneficial work in the world, then keep doing it, to the best of your ability, and don't let election results -- whether wins or losses -- slow you in that effort. Elections come and go. Parties wax and wane. Our shared and constant foes are ignorance and apathy.Greg Downeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09154543464555817869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38418152.post-47095345683249970362010-09-27T08:08:00.000-05:002010-09-27T08:08:02.448-05:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjid_4M4-F2PyxYWbYSq0tXB2TUnvcGgaM0kOimTjCx59ZsMlrneltLtO_XvujX_pKWu9VmyO1dqOnGmlu9A5RWVvNeSiKGz6R25gRCLhiqmYgunW9gzx14bUWTQTgqJhaRqNXY5g/s1600/skateboard-longtail.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjid_4M4-F2PyxYWbYSq0tXB2TUnvcGgaM0kOimTjCx59ZsMlrneltLtO_XvujX_pKWu9VmyO1dqOnGmlu9A5RWVvNeSiKGz6R25gRCLhiqmYgunW9gzx14bUWTQTgqJhaRqNXY5g/s320/skateboard-longtail.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />
Autumn is here, and the leaves have turned on my longtail. Don't tell the <a href="http://bikesnobnyc.blogspot.com/">Bike Snob</a>.Greg Downeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09154543464555817869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38418152.post-14927794826830248652010-07-21T13:16:00.002-05:002010-07-21T13:19:22.716-05:00In case you were wondering ...<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIj8j7OzOyxcPbmGjtPVZ-JqeQ90sh9ui0sOQ5gemF3q0UHELTuDj2Mnulevx3u2oXSu8VyLWrd8cqdtntprmmBshmjzuZY3jZSKthxwBQw-IhwUR-0tgBnoU6Rr-e3loCi8HFFQ/s1600/Downey+G+bicycle+2010-07-21.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIj8j7OzOyxcPbmGjtPVZ-JqeQ90sh9ui0sOQ5gemF3q0UHELTuDj2Mnulevx3u2oXSu8VyLWrd8cqdtntprmmBshmjzuZY3jZSKthxwBQw-IhwUR-0tgBnoU6Rr-e3loCi8HFFQ/s320/Downey+G+bicycle+2010-07-21.JPG" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5496425500319289154" /></a><br /><div style="text-align: center;">... yes, that was me on my flower power bicycle, breezing by.</div>Greg Downeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09154543464555817869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38418152.post-40972455051999742962010-06-22T15:25:00.008-05:002010-06-30T15:59:52.646-05:00My chapter in Education and the Culture of Print in Modern America<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/4522.htm"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 100px; height: 150px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlf1ntu2ssrJXtf3VzQMD8Yvi4LnPngEXWVAZrP-kM7BLxZYZ1MMtu7xIeyE9YpTUNlvs10vZB7DVXndAi6lNK6IvfZPXNf3BOcSQhZcNUmtP7fEKhjitRBjyGoBjJylulvOqVTg/s320/Downey+G+2010+in+Nelson+A+%26+Rudolph+J+eds+2010+cover.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5485698330017243938" /></a>The latest edited volume to emerge from the UW-Madison <a href="http://slisweb.lis.wisc.edu/~printcul/">Center for the History of Print Culture in Modern America</a> is out: <a href="http://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/4522.htm">Education and the Culture of Print in Modern America</a>, edited by UW's own Adam Nelson and John Rudolph. I'm excited in part because I was lucky enough to earn a chapter in the book with my article "Teaching reading with television: Constructing closed captioning using the rhetoric of literacy." Hope you like it!Greg Downeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09154543464555817869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38418152.post-44890549297055179822010-05-20T12:59:00.002-05:002010-05-20T13:05:52.864-05:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.journalism.wisc.edu/%7Egdowney/images/covers/Downey%20G%202008%20cover.jpg"><img style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; cursor: pointer; width: 81px; height: 122px;" src="http://www.journalism.wisc.edu/%7Egdowney/images/covers/Downey%20G%202008%20cover.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>My most recent book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Closed-Captioning-Subtitling-Stenography-Convergence/dp/0801887100/ref=sr_1_2/104-4333073-1363961?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1182431235&sr=1-2">Closed Captioning: Subtitling, Stenography, and the Digital Convergence of Text with Television</a>, received a nice review in the latest issue of the journal <a href="http://www.indiana.edu/%7Etisj/">The Information Society</a>. The reviewer wrote, "In illustrating the historical development of closed captioning in court systems as well as television, and by comparing these parallel speech-to- text domains, the author provides a level of insight that is impressive in its depth and breadth." (Now available on <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Closed-Captioning-Stenography-Convergence-ebook/dp/B001UQ5VE8/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2">Kindle</a>!)Greg Downeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09154543464555817869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38418152.post-91548659319408954972010-05-12T09:33:00.000-05:002010-05-12T09:34:18.504-05:00Have a safe and happy summer, everyone.Greg Downeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09154543464555817869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38418152.post-91698054224472622252010-04-17T06:30:00.001-05:002010-04-17T06:31:25.913-05:00Congratulations to all of our School of Journalism & Mass Communication award winners, and many thanks to those of you who were able to attend our annual banquet!Greg Downeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09154543464555817869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38418152.post-79886480141843333922010-03-30T17:14:00.002-05:002010-03-30T17:15:00.830-05:00Hope everyone is enjoying their spring break. I'm going to be on very intermittent net access this week, so please don't expect my usual lightning-fast responses to emails.Greg Downeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09154543464555817869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38418152.post-31535572300607547372010-03-05T15:27:00.003-06:002010-03-05T17:07:56.463-06:00Those strange-looking things you may have seen on the handlebars of my bicycle are "<a href="http://www.trails-edge.com/retail/te_shirts/amfbikemits.htm">Moose Mitts</a>" which finally fix my longstanding problem of finger-freezing during my morning winter ride. (Too bad it is now 40 degrees and sunny outside.)Greg Downeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09154543464555817869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38418152.post-26237012987759385702009-10-15T14:35:00.001-05:002009-10-15T14:35:59.051-05:00Interested in a job at UW-Madison? The School of Journalism and Mass Communication is in the market for a bright assistant professor who is keen to develop a high-quality research program and who will contribute to teaching in our strategic communication area and in our introductory courses. We will begin reviewing applications after November 9, 2009. Please see the full job ad <a href="http://www.journalism.wisc.edu/files/SJMC_assistant_professor_2009.pdf">here</a>.Greg Downeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09154543464555817869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38418152.post-89922633027516097062009-04-17T13:53:00.004-05:002009-04-17T14:01:48.470-05:00Many of you have heard by now that I've been elected by my fellow Journalism and Mass Communication faculty to serve a three-year term as the 11th Director of our School, starting next semester (Fall 2009). Today I've had the pleasure of meeting with some of our Board of Visitors -- who are both alumni of the School and accomplished professionals in the changing mass communication industry -- to discuss the future of education for "mediated communication" here at UW-Madison. There were plenty of ideas flying around the lunch table for ways to preserve the core principles of "truth telling and community building" upon which journalism is built, as well as the lessons of "ethical and effective persuasion" at the core of strategic communication practices, no matter what comes next in cyberspace after blogs, wikis, Google, Second Life, and (today's big topic) Twitter. I look forward to the challenge of being Director of such a vibrant School in such uncertain but energizing times, and I invite everyone I met today to keep in touch as we plan how to best build upon our current and historic strengths in teaching, research and service, both for our particular majors (and future alumni) and for the larger student population as a whole. You can email me at gdowney@wisc.edu. Cheers!Greg Downeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09154543464555817869noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38418152.post-25033450758292811562009-03-23T09:34:00.001-05:002009-03-23T09:36:06.926-05:00Spring Break is over. The rain has arrived. Battlestar Galactica is finished. Back to work!Greg Downeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09154543464555817869noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38418152.post-13340247288639278402009-03-16T08:04:00.003-05:002009-03-16T08:09:03.594-05:00Monday morning, 8am, Spring Break in a college town. Me in my favorite coffee shop, sitting at the back, taking up a table meant for three, in the obtuse-angled corner between the window and the fireplace. Wi-fi no longer bogged down by unending updates of Facebook status and perusals of today's hottest YouTube clips. Exactly five days of writing ahead of me, and counting. Turn screen to maximum brightness.Greg Downeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09154543464555817869noreply@blogger.com