thestoryofjory.com

For their final blog post, I asked my students to critique the course. Was there anything they wanted to learn about the material, but hadn’t? Did they accomplish their own objectives for the class? What would they change about the course for next semester? The responses were tremendously helpful, and at times too kind to yours truly.  Many of their critiques and suggestions will be implemented next semester, and it’s nice to know that what the students perceived and what I perceived wasn’t disparate.

Now that we’re at the very end of the semester, I realize that the students aren’t the only ones who’ve been learning.  My students have taught me several things over the past 16 weeks, and as turnabout is fair play, I suppose I should blog about what I learned in this class too.

The greatest lesson I learned is that I need to be patient with others.  I don’t think anyone would ever describe me as a very patient person; but I never thought I was all that impatient, either.  Yet although I can work patiently on a project and I’m patient with animals, I am terribly impatient with students.  It’s hard to remind myself that at one point, I too knew nothing about a topic or program and had to rely on someone to show me the way. I wasn’t always the easiest student to teach, but through the patience of my professors I was able to learn the material.  I’m sorry to those students who felt the brunt of my impatience and I will endeavor to improve that aspect of my personality.  As much as I hate to say it, Mom was right; Patience is a virtue.

Another obvious lesson is that learning isn’t something you can force on someone.  Initially, I had an attitude that I needed to control everything about my class; but I quickly realized that complete control just wasn’t possible. It only took a week to figure out that there’s a balance between domineering a class and letting the wards run the asylum.  I tried to find that balance by encouraging discussion about the material and emphasizing creativity and storytelling over technical accuracy.  For many of the students, it was their first time creating a video, Soundslide or podcast, so it didn’t make any sense that they should do it perfectly the first time.  With the expectations set to a reasonable level, students could focus more on the project and less on the grade. In the end, I think the students enjoyed doing their assignments and learned how to improve their work for the next time around.

I feel very fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with these students.  They stressed me out. Made me laugh.  Questioned me when it was needed. Listened most of the time and understood that these skills are important for their future careers. They surprised me in countless ways with their creativity and enthusiasm for the material.  Even when the quality of execution was low, their desire to learn more and improve was always high. That probably had less to do with me though and more to do with playing in Photoshop. Nevertheless, I’m going to miss those little rascals next semester.

Last week I realized two important things: first, that teaching is much more stressful than being on the other side of the lecture; and second, that it is impossible for most students to go longer than 30 minutes without checking Facebook or their cell phones.

I’m also struggling to come to terms with the fact that, while I may care immensely about the material and technology, I cannot will my students to care about it through sheer enthusiasm.  Even if I were the most enthusiastic person in the world about blogging, the students would still stare at me like I was a giant, talking Cockatiel. Enthusiasm alone is not going to cut it.

My first tactic to increase students’ level of caring was to appeal to their desire to get a job after graduation.  The students seemed to be more-or-less with me for the lecture about writing blogs and why they’re relevant.  I think the majority of students also liked learning about RSS and Google Reader, although I seriously doubt they’ll continue using it after this semester.  And that’s a shame, too, because I find RSS readers to be one of the most helpful listening tools in the communication trade – but I digress.

Many students did care about using their online identities to find a job after graduation. But a sizable number still seem to have the attitude that they can learn it later – it’s not important now. Enter ‘Get-the-Kids-Interested-in-the-Material’ tactic number two: If you know enough about technology, you can use it to creep on people way more effectively than Facebook.

I stumbled on that tactic by mistake.  I spent the whole lecture of my first class trying to apply Google Alerts and search tips to real-life job scenarios to no avail. The students were completely bored until I got to the very end of the lecture/exercise and started talking about finding information in databases.  I instructed them to go to OSCN.net so they could see how the database of information in the Oklahoma State Court Network worked. BINGO! The students got really excited when they realized they could find information on people they knew.  In hindsight, it makes perfect sense – these kids spend a lot of time snooping on people through Facebook – why not show them how to get the real dirt?

The next three classes went much more better engagement-wise, because I put more emphasis on finding information about people rather than issues.  I just hope I haven’t created an army of cyber-stalkers, and that they’ll use their information-finding powers for good purposes.

On the agenda for next week: Design for non-designers and an intro to visual story-telling. If anyone has any ideas for how to make that interesting to 19 year-olds, I’m all ears.

The first week of classes at Oklahoma State University is complete, and I don’t think my students or myself are any worse for the wear. I’ve hit a few snags – like going to the wrong classroom on the first day, breaking the projector, etc; – but I’m hopeful students will forgive that initial incompetency and really enjoy the class.

For the curious, we’ll be covering blogging, basic photography and basic Photoshop, Soundslides, basic audio and video editing in Audacity and iMovie, and we’ll dip our toes into building a website with iWeb or Dreamweaver.  Students will write weekly blogs relating their area of interest (say, Sports P.R.) to the topics we covered in class. They’ll also turn in all their projects by posting them to their blogs.

In the first week, I got them all signed up for a blog on Wordpress, and started showing them how they can post blogs, add new pages, and create tags and categories. This week, we’ll talk about writing effective blog posts and blogging strategies.  I’ll also introduce them to RSS – which not a single student said they had heard of or used before, if you can believe it – and setting Google Alerts. The blogging section will conclude the following week with a discussion about design and a workshop on improving their blog’s appearance.

I’m very excited to share what I know with these students.  Most of them indicated that they had little to no experience with blogging or audio/video editing. This class will introduce them to the skills they’ll need to become the professional communicators of tomorrow. I also hope to teach them to connect the content they create with the technology that supports it.  Communications professionals should be able to converse knowledgeably with the designers and programmers who help deliver their content. After all, the world would be a better place in the future if all public relations professionals took a little more time to understand the IT behind their projects, right?