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| Student advertisement for the class blog |
The course provided a classic liberal arts education; students critiqued the media, and students created the media. They discovered and evaluated their own relationship with the media through discussion, and they learned new styles of producing the media through many mediums: writing, podcasting and shooting video. Most importantly, I had them posting their work on the web for all to see; we had a Twitter, an Instagram and a blogger where we kept the campus news.
But, what I’d like to write about in this post is my personal effort to siphon the mindless noise out of their social media pages and get them consuming informational content in their feeds. If we can teach students to consume better content AND we allow them to create as well as critique the media, it has the best chance of having a lasting effect on their intellectual and professional growth.
In consuming, creating and critiquing the media, I intended to plant a seed that will continue to grow as students specify their interests. At least for now, they can identify some good news sources and can use some new applications (Drive, Blogger, Twitter, Instagram, iMovie, Garageband). But if I was successful, they’ll continue using their favorite social media apps to consume media that helps them become informed, global citizens. And in an ideal world, my students would move that informational content and thereby convince other teens to use social media more responsibly; then, maybe, just maybe we can reduce the colossal time-waste that is teenage social media consumption, and instead help them learn about their interests so they are more prepared for college and the real world.
I started the course by asking students to create a twitter and follow each other, and me. Then I had them follow a handful of about 35 accounts that I added to our class account. I asked them to follow news outlets like NYTimes, Washington Post, Brain Pickings, Mashable, the Colbert Report, Open Culture and various guest speakers who taught during our five-week program. These represented the accounts from which we’d consume content. Each day when students arrived for class, they were given fifteen minutes to read the news from their twitter feed.
Even if students had just added these to the feeds that they read each morning, I would still consider this a victory for their education and growth; but, on each Saturday class, we held a “Social Media Marketplace” where students sought quality feeds based on their interests that were outside of the things we were reading/watching in a media class. Some students chose to pick up design feeds like Uncrate, GOOD, Explore and Fast Company while others picked up environmental feeds like, the National Geographic, Huffington Post Green, Climate Desk, Eco Tech Daily, and Green Energy News. Simultaneously, I also asked them to prune their feeds of accounts that don't deliver useful information. Most importantly, students engaged in this process together, so what they added and subtracted could benefit others. This ensured that what students saw and read could be seen by another student, opening up dialogue and increasing understanding. We also had a class hashtag where students could tweet articles to the rest of us so that we could learn and discuss. This curricular agency paid huge dividends in the learning process.
For five weeks students were aware and critical of what was going on in the world, thanks to their social media pages. At the same time, they wrote their own articles for our blog to try to inform our school community. My students felt that following the news was hard for teens because it’s difficult to understand the background behind big stories if you read just one article. My effort to fix this was to open up their feeds to more and better information (a site like Vox built its whole mission around giving context behind the news). But I also created a project to help the students solve this issue themselves. I divided them into groups to record podcasts that explain the whole story behind a current event. This way, teenagers in the community could learn the background behind the stories and then keep up with it. My students covered Israel-Palestine, Hobby Lobby, Ukraine and Boko Haram. At the culmination of that unit, our Social Media Marketplace on Saturday focused on podcasts that the students should follow.
Perhaps the most encouraging development with our production and consumption of social media is that students wanted our blog to move to a wider audience. Halfway through the program, when I interviewed each student, a majority of my class asked me to open the target audience of our blog to outside the Advanced Studies Program. They wanted to write about the things they had become interested in during our classes and discussions; and, they wanted a greater diversity of content on the blog for others to learn as well. The rebranding of our blog proved that students believed strongly in the digital footprint we were creating and they wanted to get better!
