I believe that an instructor’s role in a class is to lead his or her students’ through knowledge as a tour guide through the materials. To be an effective tour guide, one must be thoroughly prepared. Before each class that I teach, I want at least three hours of preparation for every hour that I teach. To prepare, I reexamine the material and make a determination on the best way to present the information to my students. Sometimes, this is in the form of a lecture. Most of the time, I try to use a series of interactions to allow the students to become a part of the in-class learning experience. It has been my understanding that lectures, when used repeatedly, can lose the students’ attention and can make them disinterested in the material. I try to avoid full lecture classes whenever possible.
PDF Version Abstract The discipline of information studies is one of those areas that I enjoy teaching. I had the pleasure of teaching "IS 200: Information Literacy and Critical Thinking" during my post-doc at the University of Kentucky. One of the areas that I wish I could have done early...
Note: This post represents the first of several narratives that I need to provide the Tenure Committee before the end of September. The focus of this post will be related to my teaching over the past five years at Ohio Northern University. One of the areas that have been an...
One of my favorite classes that I teach yearly is “Communication Research Methods.” The course acts as the perfect balance between the abstract quest for understanding the cultural world that surrounds society and the concrete reality of explaining the communal relationships that currently exist. I try to make the concepts...
Today theme/topic of study: A Conceptual Framework Opening Musical Playlist: Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox Readings: “Chapter 1: A Conceptual Framework” from Paul McLean’s “Culture in Networks.” Encoding and decoding affordances- Stuart Hall and interactive media technologies Theories: Shared Social Experiences Encoding/Decoding Transmission Model of Communication Communities of locus, practice, interest,...
Today's Topic: Memes vs. Tropes Opening Musical Playlist: This is Vulfpeck Readings: Media Lingua Franca: Fixity, Novelty, and Vernacular Creativity in Internet Memes.Download Instagrammatics and digital methods: Studying visual social media, from selfies and GIFs to memes and emojiDownload KnowYourMeme.com TVTropes.com Theories: Gestalt Theory Intertextuality Memetic Artifacts: Spongebob Squarepants is...
Opening Musical Playlist: First Day Redux Theories: Parasocial Communication Transmission Model of Communication Meta-Media Memetic Artifacts: Homer Simpson hiding in the bushes The Simpsons “The Girl on the Bus” (Season 30, Episode 12) 7:05 to 7:30 Summary: Syllabus day is always a semi-weird experience as it is the combination of...
Convergent publishing is one of the harder courses to prepare for going into a given semester. I want to provide a platform for students to create content that reflects their interest and allows those students to apply what they have learned in the first two years of the Multimedia Journalism...
One of the central projects that have defined my time at Ohio Northern University has been to develop a new study aboard program between Communication and Media Studies and the University of Salford in Manchester, England. This partnership led to a one-off workshop between our two institutions and Point Park...
One of the biggest honors I received this fall was winning the Distinguished Innovative Teacher Award from the Ohio Communication Association earlier this month. It was nice to be recognized by my colleagues at Ohio Northern University and other communication professionals across Ohio. One of the areas that earned me...
One of the more consistent requests for a class from my students was a course on memes and their impact on culture and society. Most of the students would share gifs and memes via our Slack channels. There are times that I am a little lost in the visual language,...
