The Sound of the UAE

I have been teaching a practicum course at Zayed University in Dubai called Zayed Media Lab since 2003. This course has changed a lot since we first started it, but it has always stayed very true to the core idea of combining what has been learned in the curriculum of the communication college to real world [...]

Hope For Journalism?

I don’t know about you but I love long-form journalism. Think the opposite of tabloid to the micro-point journalism. I am talking about the long, full of detail, investigative story that we seldom get to read today in our commercial driven media. Well sure if we are reading a news magazine we find some of [...]

Zayed University Middle East Film Festival

www.zumeff.com is the link to the ZU Middle East Film Festival. You might be saying, “what another film festival?” But this is film festival with a twist. ZUMEFF started last year as a student graduation project. What usually happens to student graduation projects after the students graduate, nothing. But this project took on a life [...]

information Literacy are we doing anything in the UAE?

For 11 years I have been teaching my own brand of information literacy at Zayed University. I like to think that some headway has been made, I am not sure. What I do know is that there are all sorts of professors doing their own little bit to push the idea of information or maybe [...]

Low Tech Simplicity and it works.

The problem. How do I let students know I am in the office even if I am not sitting in my office? I could use an email, twitter, facebook but then I am faced with the problem a student is not tuned into the tech messaging network. For under $5 I have come up with [...]

Put up or shut up

We academics are a funny group of people. We spend our days sitting in relatively well furnished buildings dispensing the building blocks of information to the generation that is going to fix the mess we have made. But as a rule we academics do very little when it comes to actually practicing what we teach! [...]

10 seconds — Tell me the Story!

I give a lot of experimental assignments in my communication classes at Zayed University. To be honest sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t. One of the greatest challenges with many of the assignments is to convince the students that the project is a viable way of presenting ideas and thus messages to a wider, [...]

Back to the Factory?

Today I had the opportunity to sit in on a meeting with the people from du here in Dubai. The meeting itself was about Zayed University and du working toward some common goals. The conversation was fascinating and could lead to a very innovative teaching environment. But as the conversation progressed I became aware of [...]

The New Face of Assignments?

One of the issues i am confronting students with today is to make their reports, assignments, work product useful to the larger community. I am not just talking in terms of content but also in terms of delivery. This is a huge challenge that I think we as academics get a well deserved F! The [...]

Business vs Education

I have to be honest there are days I look at the person beside me in the flash car with the seemingly unlimited spending power and wonder why I stick around as a university professor. Sure there are the vacations and the very nice working hours, but is that enough? Then about this time of [...]

keep looking »