Turning a College Lecture into a Conversation with CoverItLive
Alfred Hermida
by Alfred Hermida, April 13, 2009
Tagged: coveritlive, journalism school, social media, twitter, university of british columbia
Journalists who also teach will know that one of the challenges of teaching a large, undergraduate class is the sheer number of students. It can be hard to foster a discussion in a lecture hall, where many students may be too intimidated to speak up. So instead the lesson often becomes a lecture, as the professor stands up in front of the class and talks at them for the best part of an hour. In this instructor-centered model, knowledge is a commodity to be transmitted from the instructor to the student's empty vessel.
There is a place for the traditional, one-to-many transmission. This is the way the mass media worked for much of the 20th century and continues to operate today. But the emergence of participatory journalism is changing this. Most news outlets, at the very least, solicit comments from their online readers. Others, such as Canada's Globe and Mail, use the live-blogging tool CoveritLive both for real-time reporting and for engaging readers in a discussion, such as in its coverage of the Mesh conference in Toronto.
Tools such as CoveritLive or Twitter can turn the one-to-many model of journalism on its head, offering instead a many-to-many experience. The same tools may also have a use in the classroom, as a way of turning the traditional university lecture into a conversation.
Introduction:
Many of the courses at UAL require you to produce sketchbooks and engage in reflective writing. You can use this site to develop your ideas about these practices by:
* Listening to staff and students talk about their approaches
* Reading short guidelines in a variety of formats
* Viewing examples
Both sketchbooks and reflective writing provide evidence of how your work has evolved. Remember that they are not always separate entities: some reflective learning journals contain visuals, while many sketchbooks include reflective writing.
T&L blogger Ryan Bretag recently sat down with his students and asked them about 21st-Century Learning strategies. Their suggestions are amazing.
Read the whole piece here: http://www.techlearning.com/blogs.aspx?id=15776
Some snippets:
Each discussion point started and ended with the focus on learning. For example, the students talked about creating a learning environment that was about learning not just memorization. To do this, they wanted to seek out partnerships both locally and globally in order to build connections that would foster a "learning to learn" movement where students are learning for learning, open to learning, and innovative.
Clearly, textbooks were not fast enough nor diverse enough in their eyes. They longed for ways to interact with materials that were updated frequently and offered a wealth of perspectives. In fact, a good portion felt there was a need to move beyond the textbook because "information changes to rapidly" for textbooks to be the main source in the classroom. Along with this, information and resources needed to come in a variety of formats if the curriculum was going to remain progressive and current: narrative, fiction, digital, multimedia, and non-fiction.