Getting Started
It’s just a few days before the semester begins. Faculty have returned officially to participate in CNU’s Getting Started Week. I pause from lectures, presentations, meetings and activities to get some writing done today. My goal is to complete a literature review for an essay that I started some time ago, 2007 I think. My syllabi and major course prep are complete. I have two preps this semester, one of a 400-level capstone theory course that I’ve taught four sections of previously and one of a 300-level elective for which I’ve spent much of my summer planning and priming. The COMM 326 course on Critical Theory and the Study of Popular Culture is really what led me to finally create popacademy.org. Though I’m only teaching one section this year, I’ve spent so much time this summer building a multi-user WordPress platform (with much help of course as I mentioned in the welcome post) that incorporates social media such as Twitter and links to pop culture topics and critiques.
The course design has also pulled me out of anonymous blog hiding and Twitter handle lockdown. Just as I’m encouraging my students to contribute to public discourse, I want to do the same. I’ve found such great inspiration from other academic bloggers, especially those in the social media community, many of which I’ve linked to in the Pop Academy blogroll. Prof. Hacker, even though it doesn’t officially roll out until Sept. 1, has provided me with a wealth of handy tips on incorporating tech in the classroom that I hope readers will also find useful and inspiring. I’m excited to learn with my students as we embark on this social media experiment. To that end, I want to summarize a few cool things that have come out of my return to campus.
Last week I spoke briefly to a group of newly hired faculty as part of the New Faculty Tech Orientation. I showed off Pop Academy and shared some of my experiences of using blogs in the classroom. The audience asked some fabulous questions regarding both technical and pedagogical issues. Soon, I’ll have an audio file loaded of the talk, as well as some matching screen shots to enhance key points. I’m thinking of making an “A/V Club” tab on the site to which I’ll add other multi-media projects and links. Some of the key concerns were design, copyright, privacy and student engagement. I’ll expand on these in later posts after I’ve uploaded the presentation file.
I also presented a similar topic at CNU’s Ninth Annual Faculty Conference on Teaching and Scholarship this past Tuesday. Along with another colleague, Tina Kempin Reuter of the Government department, who spoke of her experiences on using blogs in an international politics class over three semesters, we’re well on our way to recruiting more CNU faculty to use blogs in the classroom. It’s not really a numbers game, but the more faculty who use blogging tech in their courses, the more familiar our students become with the tech, too. I’m excited to be involved in recruiting academics and students to contribute to cultural discourse. The role of the public scholar is alive and well but we need to actively use our online spaces since old media formats no longer provide the platform we need.
