Many student journalists choose the field of journalism and public relations because they want their life to have an impact. And teaching about engagement can help them in their desire to create change. Research examining engagement tends to fall in three areas: 1) civic engagement, 2) student engagement and 3) employee engagement. Research definitions of [...]

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My students completed their final projects for my Online Media class. Their projects impressed me. Many students have not had any technical skills training prior to this class. I was also moved by my students’ desire to help people with their research and reporting on difficult topics. I try to encourage students to create a [...]

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I strive to help my students understand how to visually communicate their work with people. One way of reaching people is through their  professional portfolio. If your school or department does not help students present themselves professionally online, your students will struggle finding employment. To help my future students and other people, I post my [...]

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The social media release (SMR) is a press release that contains multimedia and social media elements. The point of it is to encourage writers, bloggers and other people to share the link or take the material from the press release to promote the event, company or individual featured in the SMR. Most of my students [...]

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Journalism is struggling to find its place. Brian Storm of MediaStorm challenged the rituals of journalism. Brian does not care whether you call his craft journalism. He says his organization is a media company, “I don’t even know what journalism means, but I know I am a storyteller. There is nothing revolutionary about stories.” Brian [...]

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Students are required to create a WordPress blog for their first assignment in my Online Media class. A blog is beneficial because it can help students establish themselves as an expert on a topic. As a learning tool, it teaches my students how to publish and connect information online. My hope is that they will [...]

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Online Journalism Review aggregated syllabi in 2004, however this list needs to be updated. In an attempt to aggregate this information, I have begun a list of syllabi dedicated to online journalism, online communication and social media. I found that results from Google do not showcase all of the best available syllabi online. This section [...]

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MIT created a somewhat simple program to create games. The program is called Scratch, which can be installed on both a Mac and PC. The use of games on news and information sites would likely become more prevalent if the process did not involve so much time, resources, and technical knowledge. Bonnie Bucqueroux gave me [...]

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