This has been a great summer session…intense, but productive, thought provoking and a great personal and professional development opportunity. This was just the immersion I needed in these important topics. As mentioned in my very first blog, the reading list alone was worth the price of admission. I especially appreciated the in-depth reading on Twitter, and as a former journalist, I also very much enjoyed and appreciated all the journalism connections. I really appreciated hearing the perspective of Joe Ruiz and look forward to hearing from Aron Pilhofer tonight. What a great opportunity to talk to professionals in the field!
As for attitudes…I guess I would say that this course has underscored for me that I need to continue to immerse myself in more online content. I have old media habits that die hard – for example, I still enjoy and prefer reading the NYTimes and the Statesman the old fashioned way! I need to spend more time each day online and continue to hone those skills. You learn by doing, and I am not doing enough on that front.
I guess I was most surprised by the caliber of students in the room. Not sure what I was expecting, but I learned a lot from the other students and enjoyed hearing about their many and varied experiences.
I can’t think of any additional topics…we covered a heck of a lot of ground in a few short weeks!
I would offer one observation. I wish we had devoted a little class time to discussion of research topics/papers. I talked to a couple of students off-line…and especially for those who are very new grad students or those who have not taken research methods, writing a paper like this can be a bit overwhelming. In previous grad courses, I always found it very helpful when there was a good class discussion of topics because that always lead to some peer discussion and assistance. That’s the one thing I might have added to the course outline.
Thanks again for a great summer session!
Since this isn’t a methods course, and we were pretty stretched for time, there wasn’t time to have a day dedicated to paper topics or how to approach a research paper. I think MOST of the students have taken a methods class, and for the ones who didn’t, we actually read several research papers. I tried to be specific about the methods they used, so that would be a guideline (or series of examples) to give them some ideas.
And, I was available for assistance, too. But thanks for the feedback. I’ll try to think about ways to get people feeling more comfortable without taking too much time away from content.
By: Cindy Royal on August 9, 2010
at 9:28 pm