I enjoyed the interview assignment in Mass Communication

"Interview an older person, maybe a parent and most especially a grandparent, if you can," was the basic assignment. The subject of the interview was to be the changes in mass media the interviewee had noticed over the years and also what that person thought of these changes.

PEDAGOGICAL VIEW
From a pedagogical view, this was one of my attempts to take the spotlight from the class instructor and put some of the learning on the class. One of my reasons for enjoying the assignment was that the pedagogy worked in this case. Most of the students got into the assignment and they came in with lots of material on the changes in mass media over the years.

Certainly, I could have lectured on these changes from my point of view. I am older. I have seen a lot of decades of change in mass communication. I might have even kept them awake with my recitation of the first Rome, NY - Healy Avenue phone number I remember 3-0-1-7-J. That was the party line in our house before we got the 7-0-4-8 phone number for the private line -- meaning others in the neighborhood could not pick up the phone and listen in on the conversation. (Note, you could not keep your same numbers as technology or service providers changed.)  And, while I might have kept them awake, I think they got a lot more out of hearing these experiences from their grand parents and maybe even a parent or friend.  Those interviewed did have some keen memories and interesting ideas.

Further, this way of approaching a quick bit of media history also helped us focus again on culture, a major part of this course. One interviewee, for example, talked of the importance of radio weather in Iceland and then we heard from a S. C. farmer who also mentioned the key role weather news from the radio played in their early years of farming. And, we got to hear of growing up in a small village of Mexico as well as a life in a big city in the North.

LOTS OF KEY LEARNING HAPPENED
A major reason I enjoyed the assignment was that it is a great introduction to the history of specific mediums that we will be getting into. For example, the idea of only one or three television channels was mentioned in several interviews. The idea that people actually wrote each other REAL letters was also a common theme.

HUMAN CONNECTION
I am hoping that the students also remember one of the refrains that came from many of the papers. The regret in the words of the interviewees that in the old days they interacted face to face a lot more than they see or feel happening today. One of our BIG questions as we continue exploring mass communication and media over the next several months will be this question of connection and the question of how you get people engaged.

I got to read all the papers and enjoyed the approaches the interviewers and interviewees took with this assignment. (We used small groups so everyone's paper got read but we only used about six of the papers in the full class.) I will be hoping that seeing and feeling the connection with their own past will give them a feeling of the significance of studying the history of the media so they will be better prepared to mange the future of the media.

Should be a really interesting semester because the students are deeply involved!

Creating Media about the Coker Experience

One of the courses I teach is called INTRODUCTION TO MASS COMMUNICATION, CULTURE AND MEDIA LITERACY. In the material we cover, media literacy is one of the underlying themes; often a concept the students have not discussed in those terms in their previous talks about media. One assignment that continues to provide surprises is the assignment Coker College where I ask the students to create a piece of media about the Coker experience. This assignment has evolved from using Polaroid cameras to create posters to the developing of complex power points. And, today's class set the bar higher as one of the teams had a student with final cut pro on his personal computer and they skipped the story board idea and went right to video.

The objectives of this project and this section of the class are to help the students get some concrete understanding of Media Literacy Concepts like:

Media are constructions
Media representations construct reality
Media have commercial purposes
Audiences negotiate meaning
Each medium has is own codes and conventions
Media messages contain values and ideology and
Media many have social effects, outcomes and consequences.


This project provided the class with the concrete representation. The teams all had the same assignment. Tell an audience about Coker.
video could take awhile to upload. A group that included several athletes focused on athletics, showing Coker from the Athlete perspective. Another group focused on the learning experience of the round-table classroom while providing background on things at the college. A third group focused on the theme of Coker as your home while another group provided a story of the college from founding to today. And another team used the media player function of the computer to combine power point and video to highlight happenings in this centennial year. While a 50 minute class did not do justice to the explanations, it did provide the students with a good view of how each of the teams constructed a slightly different "reality" using different content for their message. The idea of codes and conventions really took hold when those who had done the power point as assigned felt they were out of the running when they saw the two videos. Each team did understand the commercial aspects because of focus either on prospective students or prospective donors.

From the instructor perspective, it was fun to see the media literacy principles come alive. David Considine of Appalachian State was the first to introduce them to me in one of his Media Literacy courses. One of his media literacy focused books is Visual Images

Getting Ready for the New Semester

Introduction to Mass Communication, Culture and Media Literacy is one of the classes I will be teaching this semester. It is the gateway class for the Communication major at Coker. One of the resources I will be steering my students to will be the media literacy web site run by Frank Baker. Frank has an amazing web site and he provides a crucial service to those of us who teach media by providing daily links and articles from an amazing variety of sources on media topics. Frank has a new book coming out on media literacy and presidential campaigns and I am hoping that I will be able to get him to Coker to speak to the Mass Communication class on this subject.

These days just before classes start are exciting as everyone gears up for this new academic year.