Thesis Progress (10/7)

I apologize for being a little late on this post. My research over the past week focused on pedagogy, trying to determine the best way to teach students about the new brand of journalism that I'm looking into,  The first thing we need to understand is more about the students we are focusing on.  We are focused on the younger audiences, both as creators and consumers of news. A symposium at Teaching Journalism and Mass Communication in 2011 described these people as "convergent" thinkers - interested in news, even if it's only a scrap here or there, looking for visual and audio components as well and not necessarily interested in the longer, in-depth read that their parents and grandparents like. They point out that the audiences are so still emerging and that it's difficult to draw conclusions as of yet, but there are some new attempts at teaching with the idea of the "convergent" audience in mind. One possible approach allows the students to guide learning, instead of the teachers who, frankly, may struggle more to be in front of trends. We can allow students to make discoveries through "self-guided experimentation and innovation with multiplatform storytelling, sharing discoveries with each other on digital platforms." This is interesting but it does little to enforce any hard and fast guidelines,,,, unless we determine that the old guidelines no longer apply. When I looked into current curriculum at some of the top universities, I found that much of it focused on what I considered traditional journalistic lessons - fact-gathering, reporting, interviewing, media analysis, etc, Digital media seemed to be only a sidebar in the classes, and not all of them contained a digital component, This seems to be like it ignores the emerging trends. I found another article that shared this view, in which the author argued that digital literacy should be the foundation of journalistic study, with lessons about writing, reporting and editing wrapped around the digital course. Taking this one step further, I looked into ideas for bringing a deeper understanding of social media into journalism education, A study by Stephanie Bor looks more deeply at this question, laying out suggestions for pedagogy while arguing that current journalism educators have been hesitant to embrace the new technology. My initial investigations seem to bear this out, This study is one I plan to dig into more deeply. To underscore the need to look at social media and its role in how people consume the news, we can see in the latest Pew Study of Journalistic trends that 38% of people say they get their news from digital sources, while another 18% get it from social media. Together, they nearly match the 57% of people that get their news from traditional television. This information can help provide a foundation for my thesis in that it can demonstrate why a deeper study is needed into pedagogies for teachers who want to understand how to reach these social media and digital audiences, particularly when it comes to getting them their news, This is just the start of my look at pedagogies, but already I have found several sources worthy of deeper study as I try to get an idea of how I would like to pursue my own thesis.