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 (http://www.nytimes.com/) or visit a free publicly-supported national news source like National Public Radio (http://www.npr.org/) 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 (http://byliner.com) or Instapaper (http://www.instapaper.com/), 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 (http://www.gutenberg.org/) 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
Saturday, March 24, 2012
Read
In 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:
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
Counterintuitive digital media assignments
Over the last week in my new first-year undergraduate course, Media Fluency for the Digital Age, 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.
Here's the challenge they were given:
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 not available to them with the click of a mouse, and to go through the process themselves of making a portion of that non-digitized world available in the network realm for future use.
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:
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:
Other students seemed to discover that the world of print was not only still in existence, but potentially useful as well:
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:
This insight nicely operationalized the "fair use" and "public domain" discussion we had conducted in class just the week before.
Finally, a number of students commented on how they never, never wanted to rely on physical information again:
I'll be doing it again next year, for certain.
Here's the challenge they were given:
Finding information that's not online. 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 not 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.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.
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 not available to them with the click of a mouse, and to go through the process themselves of making a portion of that non-digitized world available in the network realm for future use.
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:
"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."
"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."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":
"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."
"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."
"The first librarian I asked literally laughed out loud. She couldn't believe that I was asking such a ridiculous question."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:
"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."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,
"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."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.
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:
"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."
"I think this process shows how technological processes are extremely difficult to those [who] have never done them."As a scholar who researches the history and geography of "information labor," I was delighted to see this insight emerge from the assignment.
Other students seemed to discover that the world of print was not only still in existence, but potentially useful as well:
"This assignment has showed that there is an abundance of useful information out there that is not on the Internet."
"I thought that everything was digitized these days and that no one relied solely on print anymore."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.
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:
"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."
This insight nicely operationalized the "fair use" and "public domain" discussion we had conducted in class just the week before.
Finally, a number of students commented on how they never, never wanted to rely on physical information again:
"From now on I truly will appreciate the access to information I have through the Internet."
"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."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.
I'll be doing it again next year, for certain.
Thursday, March 01, 2012
On hybrid courses, blended learning, online instruction, and educational innovation
Today 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.
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.
J 201 - Introduction to Mass Communication (4 credits, Comm-B)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
LIS 201 - The Information Society (4 credits, Comm-B)
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.
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.
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:
J 176 - Media Fluency in the Digital Age (3 credits)
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.
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).
INTER-LS 260 - Internship in the Liberal Arts and Sciences (1 credit)
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).
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.
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.
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.
J 201 - Introduction to Mass Communication (4 credits, Comm-B)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
LIS 201 - The Information Society (4 credits, Comm-B)
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.
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.
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:
- Search the Prelinger Archives 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.
- 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 US Census.
- 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.
J 176 - Media Fluency in the Digital Age (3 credits)
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.
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).
INTER-LS 260 - Internship in the Liberal Arts and Sciences (1 credit)
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).
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.
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.
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