With my colleague Alex Lockwood, we have set up a blog for anyone studying PR or Journalism at Sunderland. It's early days yet but please take a look - any suggestions on how to improve it will be welcome.
As well as providing course info and pointers to interesting discussions, we hope it will also showcase some of the great work being done by our students. I think Alex and I are quite happy with how it is developing but as expected we need to do more work to encourage students to visit - RSS is not part of their culture and life is too exciting to actually check what lecturers are saying. Likewise, it is not easy to persuade non-blogging colleagues to really get involved...
Suggestions please!
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What do I know? Students, in my experience, are much easier to persuade onto a blog than colleagues. With students, you always have the stick of assessment.
What could work with colleagues: you would think the carrot of debates and discussions with their peers (a virtual conference; a virtual peer reviewed publication). You would think...
Posted by: Richard Bailey | November 01, 2008 at 05:28 PM
Looks great. A bit jealous that our department didn't come with something similar first! :-)
Posted by: Serge Cornelus | November 02, 2008 at 11:35 AM
Thanks Phil. Was thinking about the RSS thing last night. At the moment, most of our students use the Facebook feed as their 'RSS'. Two reasons why that won't change is that 1) it fulfils 90% of their needs right now, because 2) they aren't 'working' journalists who are pressed to maintain updated ideas and knowledge of their area. So for now the best I can think of is keep double-posting all our entries into the Facebook page, and ask the students to become fans as regularly as possible.
Posted by: alex | November 04, 2008 at 07:37 AM
I've struggled to get the 'idea' of RSS over to our students on numerous occasions now. Some either get it because they are already doing it, whilst the others just look at me with disinterest.
It got to the point where I started incorporating RSS feeds into the Virtual Learning Environment to varying degrees of success. Couple that with liberal self promotion of the odd blog or two via the same VLE and you get somewhere. I'm not sure it helps too much.
Posted by: Rob | November 13, 2008 at 09:22 PM
Deep down it is all about content - if we make things interesting enough readers will find it.
Posted by: Philip | November 14, 2008 at 08:57 AM