March was a tough month for the newspaper industry. A sampling of the month’s news: The New York Times revealed it will roll all salaries back by five percent. The Christian Science Monitor published its last print edition and will now go strictly digital. The Washington Post offered employees a second buyout package - more than 100 staffers took the bait last year and voluntarily left.The Atlanta Journal-Constitution cut its news staff by 30 percent, just as the Houston Chronicle announced a 12% reduction in its own staff. Just weeks ago the Rocky Mountain News published its last edition after 149 years in print, followed closely by the demise of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, after 146 years. The Tucson Citizen is reportedly being published on a day-to-day basis until it can be determined if it is financially possible to continue publication. The San Francisco Chronicle is reportedly hanging on by a fiscal thread.In the current issue of Chronicle of Higher Education, think tank guru Kevin Carey posits that traditional universities could suffer the same fate as newspapers if they do not fully embrace the use of new technology in the classroom.
Carey’s position is that newspaper companies knew a decade ago that the online world was about to prevail in our culture, but stubbornly they clung to their old business models and suffered the fate you see described above. The article causes us to wonder how long the conventional teacher/lecturer and student/audience model can continue to thrive. The culture is interactive, communication is shorter and faster, and students are living in fully participatory environments – except in some of their classrooms. Therefore, it may be time for some of us to reevaluate and update some of our own teching methods. Here are several elements you may want to consider:
•Are you aware of and up to date on web sites that are relevant to the subject matter you are teaching? The resources available to us now via the Internet are almost limitless, but it is up to us, as teachers, to find them and determine the best way to incorporate their contents into our own course materials.
•Should you be teaching your class in a computer lab? Some classes work best in a traditional classroom setting, while others would benefit by the use of computers during the class session. Keep in mind we have limited lab space and booking these rooms is tight already. There are some preliminary discussions going on about adding an additional PC lab at the Elmwood campus, but not until 2010.
•Might you effectively incorporate use of relevant web sites into outside assignments for your students?
Considering that we now have data that indicates the average American spends up to eight hours a day in front of a screen, if our students are already there, why are we not taking full advantage of that position? Web sites that offer clever interactivity and engaging, provocative content, may truly enhance the experience we create.•Should your class be interacting with other classes? For example, we teach our public relations students that the crux of the PR person’s job is to promote a product or service (or person) by interacting with media professionals who can spread the word We teach our news writing and reporting students the skills associated with conveying information in a concise, compelling fashion. Would it then not make sense for our PR students to simulate real world promotion by interacting with news writing students whose assignment it would be to write about that product or service? Similarly, our feature writing students are
taught that their job today often involves conception of visuals to accompany their stories, in print or online. Our design students are taught the skills associated with creating engaging visuals. It would seem a no-brainer then to have a feature writing student pair up with a design student to create the total package for a story. We have arrived at a moment in the media professions where everyone must be multi-skilled, and creating irresistible content requires collaboration. The time for us to start that is during the educational process.As usual, I would like to hear your thoughts on all of this, and your suggestions that may help other faculty members expand and improve their own classes. Speak up and join the discussion.
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