Live Video Guest Lecture – Florida Southern College

I had a video guest lecture to Florida Southern College, to the class of Dr Chris Fenner. I talked about the Olympic Movement and new media from a historical perspective. Questions about the impact of emerging technologies on society in general and the Olympic experience in particular were asked.

Unlike my previous guest lectures, given to the University of Missouri-Columbia or the University of Kansas, that were done via Skype, we used a browser-based solution: TokBox. Some technical difficulties made things more challenging but the sound and video quality when the internet connection functioned at full speed were very good. The platform also enabled embedding a Slideshare presentation reducing thus the hassle of figuring out how to present additional material while keeping the video on screen.

The presentation is below:

I believe the class was a novelty for the students as well as for the college as a whole. Students engaged with me both by answering and asking questions and they seemed to genuinely enjoy the lecture. This shows that there is some great potential in integrating live video into traditional in-class, on-campus lectures.

Many thanks to Chris Fenner and James Lynch for making this possible.

New Media Katho course – June09 evaluations

During the first week of June I was in Belgium again delivering for the second time my own course on new media. I had 14 Erasmus students from all over Europe, a dynamic, lively and very interested class that I have enjoyed teaching. It was a marathon class with 4 hours of teaching daily, tight deadlines, team projects, a company visit, small research tasks, and other academic assignments. It was also a class of novelties, the first time when I had a guest, Dr Mugur Geana, Assistant Professor of Strategic Communication at the University of Kansas, joining us live all the way from the USA. 

Similar with the last semester, all students were asked to take a short online survey evaluating the course, the content, my delivery, the materials and technologies used, the relevancy of the course to their future careers and giving their suggestions for further improvements. 

What makes me especially happy is that the evaluations this semester are better than the previous ones. I am also glad to see that students liked the hands-on approach to the class and found it useful and challenging.

Here’s the overall evaluation for the course:

You can see the complete evaluation file here:

guest lecture @ Imperial College, London

On Monday, March 23, I gave a lecture on using web 2.0 to promote creativity and creative work in social media and professional environments. The attendees of the lecture were students from the Missouri School of Journalism of the University of Missouri-Columbia in the USA, now in London for a semester doing internships related to their undergraduate majors. All the thanks to Byron T. Scott, Professor Emeritus of Journalism at the University of Missouri – Columbia, who made this all possible. 

It was an evening meeting that took place in one of the rooms of the Imperial College in London after the students had finished their busy and challenging working days. I was impressed to find out about the prestigious companies they were interning with and the daily activities on their agendas. Similarly, I was impressed by how interested the students were in new media and their desire to experiment with it much higher than the one of the European students (from the UK or Belgium) that I have lectured to before. While most of the students seems to use social networks because most of their friends do there is little awareness of privacy policies and how these can be changed so that personal information can be kept separate from professional one. Similarly, most of the students  have heard of many of the platforms available online (from blogging, to social media, live streaming – be it audio or radio) but their knowledge stopped there. Also, many of them had the skills and talent to produce high-quality content for these platforms but proved to be quite reluctant to experiment with them the fear that their creative work will wrongly appropriated by somebody else being higher than the desire of making themselves and their talent known.

While having a master’s degree in social networking such as the recently launched by the Birmingham City University might not necessary, students now enrolled in media schools (focusing on arts, journalism, communication…) should however be exposed more to social media as well as be encouraged to explore this realm rather than taking it for granted. 

 

Teaching @ UWS

I am currently pursuing a Programme Certificate in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. Part of the module requirements is providing the assessors with a teaching session to observe. Since my online teaching and teaching abroad were not accepted I had to ask for the support of others members of staff from my school. My supervisor helped in this process and I was more than lucky to soon receive a couple of offers. I am particularly thankful to Dr. Marcus Bowman and Tony Grace and their students whom I joined earlier this week. While the general subject of all lectures was new media, finding examples relevant to each class and their area of specialization – radio in one case and film and scriptwriting in the other – required a lot of work and plenty of exploration in domains that only adjacent to my studies and practical expertise. However, I have enjoyed the experience and believe that preparing these lectures broadened the spectrum of my knowledge. They also gave me an opportunity to interact with other lecturers from my department as well as feel how engaged with and aware of new media the students in our campus are.

While in class, I have asked students to help me take pictures and film the lecture engaging them with the technology but also raising their awareness to how they could use the products thus achieved. I wish our campus in Ayr had Wi-Fi in all classrooms. This would have enabled me to present even more live examples from the web 2.0 world as well as have students live blog from the class or help me update my Flickr and Twitter. You can access the two presentations here.

Katho New Media Course – Evaluation

At the end of the New Media course I taught in Belgium, I kindly asked the students to fill in an online evaluation survey. This enabled me to see how the students perceived their course experience, whether they believed they benefited from the classes as well as to determine what areas of the course could be improved. I will leave the graphs below to speak for themselves.

The course had a practical component as well and took students to a visit to Netlog, Belgium’s first and one of Europe’s leading social networks very popular with young people. Here students were given three presentations focusing among others on employability skills sought by social networks, advertising models and challenges in a web 2.0 world. Asked what they liked most about the New Media course, most of the students mentioned the Netlog visit and that they felt that the notions taught during the previous days of the course were reinforced by the visit.

Here is a more elaborate answer: 

“Honestly, this was one of my most favourite courses EVER. I liked the presentations, the topics, the examples, the way how we learned, the interactivity and the style of the professor too. It was understandable and very interesting for me. The mostly I liked the visit at the NetLog. It was a great idea for the last course. We learned a lot there too and this visit made us more open-minded as well, I guess.”