Citizen Journalism: Online Production and Community Engagement
A January 2012 report from the National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement noted that the United States is at a "crucible moment." In response, American colleges and universities are increasingly encouraged to utilize technologies that facilitate connections among communities and students. This session will examine how action-oriented curricula such as web-enhanced citizen journalism projects can help students cultivate the literacies that lead to individual growth as well as public betterment. Session attendees will be asked to consider the feasibility of outward-facing initiatives on their campuses and to assess the options for a technologized approach to experiential learning.
Integrating Video with Social Media
Video for social media often resides in a multimedia online environment alongside text, web-based navigation, animated graphics, and photography. This session will address clarity of content, decreasing attention spans, and new situational aesthetics brought about by the acceptance of viewing rich media over mobile devices. Furthermore, the proliferation and use of social media mobile devices with advanced video and photographic capabilities offers new opportunities to learn how to produce high-quality video content. Takeaways will include instructional design guidelines for video production and a list of technical resources geared toward producing video for social media.
The Use of BlogTalkRadio in Online Management Classes
This study investigates students' perspectives with respect to the use of BlogTalkRadio (BTR) to generate resource materials for online management classes. Results indicate that 79% of the participants considered BTR interviews hosted by an instructor with student participation constitute a good way to enhance student-student, student-instructor, and student-content interaction in online classes. Ninety-one percent agreed that interviews with entrepreneurs and executives on BTR constitute one of the ways to find out how concepts learned in management classes are put into practice. BTR can be used across different disciplines such as psychology, sociology, political science, religious studies, and so forth.
