In my most recent paper Tag me, tweet me, ting me: Teaching and assessing student engagement in social media, I have been looking at ways the journalism pedagogy can be expanded to embrace social media.
The paper looks at the exciting new area of how journalism practitioners and lecturers need to make sure journalists of the future know how to make the most of social media.
The profession of journalism has experienced an unprecedented tsunami of change in the last two years and journalism teaching must respond. The Net Generation (Tapscott 2008) are more savvy, switched on and social than any preceding learners. They think nothing of creating, editing and publishing social content in a wired web 2.0 (O’Reilly 2005) world that they control.
Tag me, Tweet me, Ting me: teaching and assessing student engagement in social media sets out to look at three key research questions at a time of revolutionary change in media habits, which are affecting the delivery of journalism teaching at Uclan.
How as lecturing practitioners do we decide what social tools students need to learn? Social media platforms are susceptible to fickle popularity trends and journalists of the future need to be able to distinguish brand and functionality.
How can lecturers encourage engagement with social media in a professional way? Using tools socially and professionally are entirely different learning objectives and lecturers need to identify how meaningful engagement is quantified. How can university teaching of social media in journalism converge what students, on one hand, and professionals, on the other, deem relevant?
How can engagement in social media be assessed and what are the best tools to measure engagement? How do we balance our responsibilities to create gated, safe learning environments which offer some protection from libel and copyright with the need for students to build-up real life profiles and practices?
My reflections while researching this paper and discussing the content with several colleagues, have revealed an inherent confusion across the department as to what and how we should teach and assess engagement with social media.
The creators of the web’s most iconic social tools, from Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook, Jack Dorsey’s Twitter, or Google’s Tim Berners-Lee, all had one philosophy in common: making the web a collaborative medium. With news organizations such as the BBC and CNN pushing social media to the top of the journalist’s toolkit (Bunz 2010), journalism schools are starting to recognize the need to integrate social media into their curricula. The question for journalism lecturers is how do we educationalise Gillmor’s concept that ‘my readers know more than I do’, Tapscott’s identification of the Net Gen Prosumer and engage with Clay Shirky’s epochal change to create journalists of the future capable of advancing the profession to the heights it deserves?
Initial reactions welcome!
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