Dr. Paul Martin Lester, Professor
Below are email messages I've received from
California State University, Fullerton
657/278-5302; Email |
Homepage
those grappling with new media reform. If you
can help with your experiences, please send a
message by clicking on the email link above.
kathleen mcdougall kmcdou01@hills.ccsf.cc.ca.us student in multimedia studies at city college San Francisco considering teaching in elementary or secondary Wants general new media information. Wants to know of any help from professionals. It is okay to include message on website. downsized from a financial investment job trained to teach French long ago considering teaching in elementary or secondary becoming literate my media is photography wondering what subjects if any are relevant to teach prior to college level. I am planning more courses in internet and web design and photoimaging and may end up in one of those areas. Still searching for a concentration. Feel drawn to teaching since I have had a long a grueling career in a highly competitive area pioneered as a woman and now I want to work in a more socially redeeming atmosphere and I feel I have a lot of experience that's relevant. I understand there are job opportunities in new media according to our multimedia careers teacher but I can't imagine getting a whole new 4 year degree in order to teach. I'd rather work in the field as a professional and teach part-time or teach full-time in the elementary level using a concentration in multimedia to make the classes more creative and interactive or teach some skills of multi-media in high school. Do those programs exist yet? I'm going to talk to someone at Balboa High here in SF since I heard they've had some success teaching kids skills that then took them to jobs at places like Macromedia.return to the top
Craig Anthony Thomas craig.thomas@wmich.edu Western Michigan Community journalism Wants to create a new media course. Wants to create new media program. Wants to know about equipment/staff challenges. As the University shifts its journalism section from the English department to the Communications department it is imperative that the newly configured journalism section include new media studies. Should new media studies be incorporated into the entire fabric of journalism education Or should new media studies be confined as a specific concentration In either case what are the equipment and staffing concerns to be expected Thanks for your consideration of this request for information. Sincerely Craig Anthony Thomas
Mitch Land mland@unt.edu University of North Texas Teaching responsibilities: new media technologies media ethics public relations international communication Wants general new media information. Wants to add new media to a course. Wants to create a new media program. Wants to know of any help from professionals. It is okay to include message on website. I would like to know what approaches a professional program should follow. Our journalism graduate program is nationally accredited. It is one of the few master's programs with a professional orientation that is accredited in the state of Texas. Thus we want to remain relevant and would welcome ideas on how to orient our graduate students in the most productive new media directions.
Paul, hi Is this the sort of thing you wanted? 1. Our site does not yet use any of the truly new media. Site I have a grad student polishing this up, but will take to late May to post and it still won't be whizbang. 2. I started our new media course from scratch in as a survey with minimal lab in 1994 and taught it two or three times as an experimental course before walking it through the curriculum committees. Now it's elective in all journalism-communication curricula at BA and MS levels, and required in a new BA concentration in business and professional communication. At first, it was largely exploratory -- a look at the history of previous sea changes, such as Gutenberg, steam press, radio-tv... and a recon of "current" developments. The hands-on work was largely superficial windoze stuff and a show-tell by the Chicago Tribune's AOL guru. A lot of the learning was student inquiry, usually via library work or telephone interview, into the background and current status of specific issues either from my shopping list or their interests. We required several reports to the class. By the 95 session, we had Netscape and slow web access. We did more looking and discussing, but still concentrated on the original format. Third time out, we had individuals build rudimentary web pages. I backed off to a minor role, and a part-timer (Martha Stone) who was making her living doing a site for a big magazine publisher was the lead instructor. Since then, she's taught it twice solo, and has had students work in teams to make some impressive (to me) pages. (We don't have them online, except in the classroom during the final weeks of the course -- another problem with our technosystems.) This year, we subdivided the course into a market-focused section for marketing communications masters candidates and a media-and-or-journalism focused section for others. A third member of the faculty, recently hired to a full-time vacancy after years as a part-timer with strength in visual work (Mike Ensdorf), teaches his own version, and we chat about goals, emphasis, the bleeping technoweenies, and so on. In an institution like ours, where technical support is spotty at best, a part-timer needs an advocate-mentor-troubleshooter who's around during the day before an evening class, for example. More than once our hired geeks or paying students ruined the working copy of our stuff on a server and I had to haul out a backup. We frequently ask ourselves how much the whiz-bang is getting in the way of real learning. I think we've decided it's unavoidable, so let's concentrate on teaching principles, survival strategies, and incidentally some enjoyable how-to-do-it-with-this-particular-product. We got a grant for PageMill, but had to provoke a political crisis to get the technocrats to upgrade to Win95 in some of the Pentium labs so we could use it. To me, the fundamental lessons seem to be: Change is inevitable and rapid. Learn to cope. Consider mid- or long-term social effects of media change. What CONTENT and RESULTS do you seek to convey? Don't let Binary Bill's minions put blinders on you. My colleagues might disagree. *************************************** John R. McClelland, associate professor of journalism, School of Communication, Roosevelt University, Chicago area, IL. jmcclell@acfsysv.roosevelt.edu
Hi Les. You might find the NY Free Media Alliance website interesting for your purposes--it's Free and includes our mission statement and info from some activities that we've been doing since we started up in June '97. Activity so far: 6/97 Formation of NYFMA. At the Freeing the Local Media gathering, The Learning Alliance, NYC. 10/97 The Mogul World Tour. March on six giant media conglomerates in midtown, NYC. 12/97 Cameras in the Courtroom? Live debate on MNN public access TV, NYC. 1/98 "Putting the Demo Back into Democracy"screening at The Lotus Club, Lower East Side, NYC. 1-hour videotape chronicling the Mogul World Tour, featuring Prof. Bob McChesney. Available from Paper Tiger TV, tigertv@bway.net (212)420-9045. 2/98 Micro-power Radio Weekend. Fundraiser party for Steal This Radio 88.7FM and East Coast Microbroadcasters Conference in Philadelphia, 4/98. Micro (215) 472-4903. Workshops on how to build a low-watt radio transmitter, and tips on starting a pirate radio station. Raffle for free transmitter. 3/98 Co-sponsored First East Coast Micro-power Radio Conference in Philadelphia. 4/98 Organized press conference announcing the lawsuit "Free Speech vs. the FCC," and the act by Steal This Radio 88.7FM on the Lower East Side of publicly going back on the air, in defiance of threats by the FCC ******************************** Maybe Crash Media's website will interest you also: Crash and Paper Tiger TV's, of course: Paper Free the Media! JessicaPaul: I'm going on leave next year, so some of this stuff will get a bit stale, but here's what little I have so far: I have two sites in the department Web page that you can put links to. My advanced editing and design class page has several links: class And another page has a collection of links I haven't checked lately: links feel free. FYI, the in-depth class all our print majors are required to take and soon all our xcast kiddies will take, too, has teams working on projects that will produce xcast, print and Web stories. ================================================== Ham Smith Hampden H. Smith III Professor and Head Department of Journalism and Mass Communications Washington and Lee University Lexington, Va. 24450-0303 540-463-8434 FAX 540-463-8045 SmithH@wlu.edu home