Media Education for yesterday not tomorrow!

Posted on | May 14, 2010 | No Comments

I am a very lucky academic in that I am today teaching in a program at Zayed University that has thrown out what we are doing and totally reinvented not only what bit how we will teach.

The what we will teach was the easy part, the how is still to come.

The big words in media today are free vs pay, convergent, online, citizen, social, web2.0, web, mobile.

Journalism and mass communication education is being turned on its head.

And I believe we needed to do this long ago.

Journalism and mass communication education is a lot like museum studies in that it is based on how can we preserve the past, both in content and technique, to keep a vocational path alive.

I have stopped counting the number of journalism and mass communication professors I have met who tell me about WHEN then worked for CNN, BBC, NBC, ABC, they all puff out their chests and stand on their tip toes.

Of course when you call them on the fact that they are no longer in the field and living as an observer reminiscing about the past they stumble on to how they are still in touch and contact with people in the field.

When a broadcast journalist tells me their sample reels are on tape and cannot be played as examples to students I get very worried.

The fact that the field of journalism and mass communication is in a total reinvention phase and that the bedrock of the vocation is being recast makes me wonder how relevant anyone teaching in the areas of journalism and mass communication can be if they themselves are not engaged in the field!

I teach in a communication and media sciences program and I am totally engaged in the media where I am teaching!

Is it possible we have things backwards in journalism and communication education?

Today in the program I teach in we have an internship at the end of an education program.

What if we were to turn the education process around?

What if the education was the internship with courses offered intensely, using web2.0 and beyond with a short academic stay at the end?

Why not?

Media is about engagement, communication, technology, community yet we effectively disengage students form the very community they are suppose to be joining.

Is this possible? One word, iTunesU!

Yes this internship to academy education model is possible if those teaching can pull themselves out of the museum model of journalism and communication education.

Why are we so averse to online teaching?

Why not hyper specialize our education?

Check out the funk university!

Bootsy Collins presents the world’s first Funk University for bass players of planet Earth. Construction of this online campus will conclude in June, with the first semester beginning on July 1, 2010.

Why are we pulling students away from the workplace when we could educate them in the workplace?

It is time, today, to reconsider the way we educate.

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