Course

Tools

• Blog

Realization

The seminar started in a traditional manner with a reading part in which we dealt with journalism and its general challenges, especially in East Europe, all based on existing literature. The task here for the students was a classic one, presenting and commenting on the respective texts. Other than in a traditional seminar we discussed the contents in the face-to-face session, both in general as well as in alignment with the speakers' suggested structure (information on/perspectives of the text, relevant aspects, structure, content-related, what's missing, etc.) on how the text was to be published in the blog. In the second part the students that wanted to attain a graded certificate of participation presented a "best practice" example. Here one understands journalistic content that contains or will contain a content-related ambitious piece for the general public. This aspiration should be critically examined based on questions we worked out beforehand (goals, content, independence with regard to funding, etc.). The students subsequently prepare their research in the semester holidays for a longer contribution in the course blog (4500 words).   

As the acquisition of e-learning skills and not blended learning skills was the aim, there was only an online event focusing on the decentralized cooperation (penultimate session). 

Experiences made by the lecturer

Learning goals: Discussing abstract topics in a comparative manner, focus on current phenomena. Application-based reading of academic, abstract texts (transfer function). Editing these texts for the "editors' conference", i.e. for a joint blog in which the abstract content can be worked on so that it is generally understood and related to the issue being focused on. Writing a blog entry resp. two blog entries (technical and content-related design competencies).  

Learning content: Transformation of the media systems in the wake of the political system change and the problems that cropped up here (problem of simultaneity (Offe): the political economy of those acting). Current media regulations and laws, development of the eastern European media markets, changes in journalism due to digitization, the resulting consequences for journalism in the sense of problems and new possibilities.

Expectations: I actually did expect that more students would participate in the seminar, ideally also students that had some prior knowledge of East Europe as we have the Institute for East European Studies at the department. I did not expect any expert blogging skills by my students, even though they study media and communication, with regard to blogging competencies. 

Positive results: The idea of designing an editorial scenario using a blog in which the students can discuss a joint project was very successful. For studying communication sciences such a teaching and learning scenario is pretty much ideal as the problem of the interdisciplinary field of studies is the wide array of content and the respective contexts and systematics to which it is related, even though one can focus this. This can be structured quite well for the discussion, basically as respective blog entries as learning units. As there were few participants I was able to supervise much more individually. The situation was also favorable for bringing in design ideas for the blog by the students.  

Problems: First I set up an official FU blog and not a user blog, which led to a slowing down of the registration process and the getting-to-know the Wordpress system. The FU blog does not allow for little creative freedom. It was not clear to me which role should be assigned to the students. At the start I only assigned them an author's role, whereby they were very limited when it came to editing pages so that I changed their role to administrator. I also saw some uncertainty in the students when it came to the divergence from a traditional seminar design. The students were quite irritated that they had to post a blog entry instead of handing in a term paper, especially with regard to the grading.

Role as educator: Through the joint project of a blog the role was more collegial and less assessing.

Merken