Tag: Media Studies

Categories
Academic

[Publication] Collaborative Learning in Media Education

I have a chapter published in this book – just out:

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Marcus Leaning (eds), 2015. Collaborative Learning in Media Education. Santa Rosa: Informing Science Press. ISBN: 9781932886931

Collaborative learning is a key pedagogic activity in many media education programmes in schools colleges and universities worldwide.  When well executed, collaborative work enables students to learn much from each other and gain valuable experience of working in concert – a skill central to contemporary work practices in many media industries. Moreover, many media educators argue educational practices and approaches should evolve and shift better to suit the networked nature of contemporary media and collaborative learning activities can be facilitated and enhanced by the use of social media.

This volume brings together chapters from leading researchers and academics in institutions across the UK. Comprising of eight chapters that explore issues such as the theoretical background of collaborative learning, the issues involved in using social media technologies for collaboration, using wiki pages for learning and distributed collaborative learning in rural locations.

Purchase book, or see my chapter here.

Contents

Introduction:   Collaborative Learning in Higher Education Media Education Programmes

                        Marcus Leaning

Section 1      Thinking Collaboratively

Chapter 1:        Framing Collaboration in Media Education

Marcus Leaning

Chapter 2:        Programming Collaborative Leaning

Bex Lewis

Chapter 3:        Exploring the Use of Collaborative Learning in an Experientially Designed Student Undergraduate Programme: A Case Study

Melanie Gray

Section 2      Social Media Technologies and Collaboration

Chapter 4:        Empowering the Learner, Liberating the Teacher? Collaborative Lectures Using New Technologies

Dan Jackson and Richard Berger

Chapter 5:        Student Wiki Pages: Online Collaboration in a Networked Learning Environment

Einar Thorsen

Chapter 6:        Structures for Digital Collaboration and Interaction

Lisa Stansbie

Section 3      Collaboration In and Out of the Classroom

Chapter 7:        Stories & Streams: A Problem-Based Design for Student-Led Collaboration and Peer-to-Peer Teaching Across Media Practice Modules
Paul Bradshaw, Jonathan Hickman and Jennifer Jones

Chapter 8:        University of the Village
Jem Mackay and Karl Phillips

Contributors

                        Author Affiliation

                        Editor

Index              …….

Categories
Life(style)

UMCAT: School of Journalism, Mass Communication and Business Studies #TFBloggers

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We spotted the sign for this on the first day – right next door to our guest house, so Friday morning, whilst waiting for the broken down truck to be repaired – we had an opportunity to pop into the building. Not sure many English universities would like it if you just popped in and asked to look around.

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We were met by the Academic Registrar, who was really pleased to show us round, ensuring that we also signed the visitors book.

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The School first opened in Kampala in 1996, and opened this one in Soroti in 2010 – with the first students about to graduate in March. There’s expected to be around 40 who will have submitted reports from their internships, from a total of 170 students across all years.

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Many of the students were sat outside in groups, or round a table with a tutor – small groups of 4-5, although there are two lecture halls (reminded me of a garage) that seats 40 – with a large chalk board.

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All teaching is done face-to-face, there’s no online learning, although they hope to one day – but many students don’t have computers. The schools that we’ve seen in the villages are most definitely ‘learn by rote’, so this looks more interactive! The courses started off as journalism courses, but have expanded to include business development – all to diploma level.

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There’s a small sound-proofed radio booth – this can only be heard within the school (on FM), but is good practice, and makes it easier for students to get internships which appear to be core to the course. We also saw the computer room, with around 9 screens running off one CPU – none with the internet.

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Many of the students do have phones, but again, mostly for talking as smart phones are too expensive. These are used extensively, and indeed, in every spare socket a phone was plugged in charging. The school has several ‘self-help’ type inspirational notices, as in this country it does appear to be survival of the fittest, but the school indicated that this gives students a good chance at a job – within the sector… but that social media isn’t on the curriculum.

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You can see more about the School at http://umcat.co.ug

Categories
Academic Digital

Book Review: Cultures of Mediatization

Anyone read this book? Sounds quite hard going!

More worrying, this book is dated by the use of words such as “cyberculture”, “cyborgs” and “cyberpunks”. While there is attention paid to the Frankfurt School (again) and the medium theory of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan, the participatory nature of the read-write web is neglected. Certainly there is attention in chapter 3 to theories of mediation, building into a definition of mediatisation, which is described as “the process in which these diverse types of media communication are established in varying contextual fields and the degree to which these fields are saturated with such types”. But once more, the challenge emerges in the echo chamber of definitions between “media”, “culture” and “communication”. At his most reverberant, Hepp confirms that “media culture are [sic] the cultures of mediatization, which becomes concrete in certain mediatized worlds”.

Read full review.

Categories
Academic Digital Event Speaker

Speaker: Programming Collaborative Learning #collabmedia

Programming Collaborative Learning (HEA, University of Winchester)

View more presentations from Bex Lewis.
This will be followed by a 4-6000 word (inc references)  publication shortly.
Categories
Academic

Media Studies: Of Value?

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Once again, media studies is in the firing line! When done well, it’s an excellent course, with excellent transferable skills (as well as the intrinsic skills):

Media self-hatred is fuelling the attacks on media studies, says Sally Feldman

So media studies is in the firing line again. This time, the renewal of hostilities was prompted by the appointment of Les Ebdon as head of the Office for Fair Access. He has incurred the wrath of critics not merely for his trenchant views on widening access, but also for his championing of non- traditional subjects such as media studies.

This has put him at odds with the MPs who make up the Conservative Fair Access to University Group, who dismiss media studies as one of the “soft” subjects – an assertion that has only been tepidly opposed by David Willetts, the universities and science minister. Willetts may have recently acknowledged that these “are often really valuable vocational courses”, but that faint support hasn’t stopped him from removing the teaching grant that has until now made them viable.

But by far the most vituperative attacks on media studies have come from the media itself. On Ebdon’s appointment, for example, the Daily Mail called him a “champion of Mickey Mouse degrees” – foremost among which was, of course, media studies.

“I have always found it curious that those in the media do not take themselves seriously enough to think of the media itself as an object of academic study,” commented Martin McQuillan, dean of arts and social sciences at Kingston University, in these pages (“Weapon of Mass Education”, 1 March). “I can only put it down to some form of transferential self-loathing.

Read full story.