Using the Web to showcase our teaching

Poking around the World Wide Web, I came across this homepage (linked in the headline above) for a seminar series on networks at MIT.

It is a simple example of how to use the Web to welcome people into our school and let them see – and learn from – what we’re up to in our classes.

Imagine this display as a course syllabus. The first column is the meeting date. The second column refers to the guest speaker or, more typically in a course, the author of a key reading or the subject of an example/case study that will be discussed that day. (This column links to that person’s biography or other background material.) The third column is a mug shot of the speaker; more generally, it could be some visual representation of what the class will address on any given day (including mugs of speakers or authors of key readings, etc.). The fourth column is the topic of the class. The fifth column links to notes from the session, in this case supplied by the guest speaker; in the more usual case these could be a “story” or report on the day’s discussion posted by a student in real time to the Web during or after the class session.

So imagine a line for a class session in a "Media Ethics" course in which students discuss reporter-source relationships, using the film “Absence of Malice” as a fictional case study.

COLUMN I: Sept. 13

COLUMN II: "Absence of Malice"

COLUMN III:








Sally Field, a.k.a. reporter Megan Carter

COLUMN IV: Ethical boundaries in reporter-source relationshps

COLUMN V: Class report by Annie Flanzraich (this links to another report by Annie; I'm just illustrating the idea)

It seems to me this ought to work in any “non-methods” courses: media ethics, First Amendment/media law, journalism history, JOUR 101, etc., and could work in writing, photography and other journalism methods courses with some adaptations. Our students could post reports each day the course meets; we could promote the most interesting reports daily from the homepage of our RSJ Web site.

I think this would be a great way to prepare, and share, our syllabi and then to share with the world what actually happens on any given day in any given course. This is one way to capture, in Jean Trumbo's conceit, the "beautiful noise" that is the Reynolds School of Journalism.

What do you think?

Outsourcing term papers

The New York Times engaged in a quality control experiment, purchasing English literature papers from three online sources. The results are disturbing, humorous and worth some consideration.

"For $9.95 a page [a student] can obtain an 'A-grade' paper that is fashioned to order and 'completely non-plagiarized.' This last detail is important. Thanks to search engines like Google, college instructors have become adept at spotting those shop-worn, downloadable papers that circulate freely on the Web, and can even finger passages that have been ripped off from standard texts and reference works.
"A grade-conscious student these days seems to need a custom job, and to judge from the number of services on the Internet, there must be virtual mills somewhere employing armies of diligent scholars who grind away so that credit-card-equipped undergrads can enjoy more carefree time together."

My question: How might an instructor craft the kind of assignment that demands a product one can't possibly buy online (or grab from a dorm-mate)?

"CBS Evening News with Katie Couric" debuts

I had hoped to watch Katie Couric's debut live -- meaning at 3:30 p.m. PDT -- on the CBS News Web site as it streamed her East Coast broadcast. But life happened, and I ended up watching it on the same site at 9:30 p.m. -- three hours after it aired on the West Coast and six hours after it aired originally back East.

So the best thing about the new CBS News for me so far is the time shift allowed by the video streaming on the Web.

As for the broadcast itself, what was good and bad had little obvious connection to the (alleged) $15-million-a-year anchor. But she's the reason I watched, so here are a couple of observations about her debut.

Couric seemed to try very hard to be accessible and neighborly, with such useless lines as "As many of you know, next Monday is the fifth anniversary of 9/11" (or some such -- I'm paraphrasing more than quoting exactly here). As many of us know? Not all of us? Which of us? Why divide the viewers into those who are in the know and those who are oblivious? Why not: Next Monday is the fifth anniversary of 9/11 -- a simple statement of fact to orient us to her next point?

She also pitched the CBS News Web site repeatedly, as a kind of claim to with-it-ness -- anchor as Web star. She invited viewers to submit possible sign-off lines -- thereby subverting whatever authorial signature effect such a signoff might have to some kind of populist participatory sloganeering. It tells us something about Dan Rather than he chose to exhort "Courage" at the end of each newscast. It tells us something entirely different about Katie Couric that she is outsourcing her signature.

Finally, she concluded the broadcast by saying, again in a bid to be accessible and neighborly, something to the effect of "I hope to see you tomorrow night." Sorry, Ms. Couric, it's a one-way see-through mirror. We see you, but we're invisible to you -- except in the imaginary space you are trying to create to comfort us all.