2008 Poynter Educators Forum

Teresa · Teresa

This is my second attempt at posting this so here's hoping it goes through... Problems: Only two of the three journalism minor faculty teach journalism. We love our third member (a digital cultures scholar hired as a result of a PhD-only tenure-track journalism faculty search), but we didn't gain a...

denise · denise

Where to start with our needs? PBA is a great small school with a lot of heart and a few eager students. Our challenges come from the top down. First off, the president of the university doesn't really trust student publications (students want to cover things like campus crime, not one of his favorite t...

PennnyFuchs · PennnyFuchs

What needs work? To put it bluntly, our faculty. We have very few faculty members who can tell stories in print, on TV/radio and online. We have two online specialists and rely on adjuncts to deliver other high-techcourses. On the full-time faculty, everyone has his or her area of expertise and seems...

angiechuang · angiechuang

I'm tempted to just write "What Stephanie said" for all of these, but I won't ... One of the hard truths that we faculty have had to confront is that each of us is at a totally different place with our own knowledge of technology and comfort with using / teaching it. Since most of us come from pro...

jimmynan · jimmynan

I'm echoing others' comments. Not enough equipment, not enough knowledge on the part of most of the faculty although to be fair we're receptive to change--it's just hard to find time and assistance necessary to learn some of the new equipment, software, techniques, etc. Our IT people are coopera...

Robinson · Robinson

At the graduate level, I dont see a lot of the journalism professors incorporating multimedia into their curriculum in any kind of a significant manner, though students are encouraged to add digital accompaniments to their class projects. Challenges here include time in the classroom (i.e. ther...

kbculver · kbculver

We continue to face funding troubles. It's a bleak time in public higher education and we feel it in faculty numbers, student access to classes, multimedia equipment and training opportunities. We also have varying interest in truly implementing converged courses. Finally, as much as peopl...

RKanigel · RKanigel

We need more training. Most of our faculty are experienced professionals but we left newsrooms 5, 10, 20 years ago. We have little experience with modern newsgathering and reporting techniques. We need more communication with the outside world. We're an insular department -- we don't even talk to...

Joanne M. Lisosky

Like everyone else in this string, more money would make our jobs easier ... but with more money comes the question: on what do we spend it? More equipment? What equipment? More faculty? What expertise? Its imperative that future journalists can tell a good story well, make sound ethical decision a...

donnapaz · donnapaz

We need more training in technology, despite a desire to teach it. We need more journalism-only computer labs (as it is, we have to share two, 30-computer labs with the rest of the College of Arts and Humanities). We're lucky to have a fair amount of software, but we need to be able to offer it just to our s...

Sue · Sue

MSU is wrestling with many things that the rest of you mentioned. The biggest obstacles: lack of equipment or money to buy equipment, faculty resistance, lack of experience among faculty members in new technology and new media, lack of training for faculty to make them comfortable teaching new thi...

Eileen · Eileen

I have to get changes through the curriculum committee, and assuming that I am successful, I have to convince colleagues AND students that this is an area worthy of embracing. I have students who turn to the Internet for everything--they don't even consider looking up a number in the phone book. But w...

snazzblake · snazzblake

Here I am, as promised. Apart from a lack of faculty cohesion, I see other problems: I think we talk a good multimedia talk with our students, especially our undergraduates, but we don't act on it. I wish the undergraduates had the opportunity to work on the Observer, or create their own magazine in its...

stevefox · stevefox

Like many place, we face the silo problem here. One faculty member actually used the term during a faculty meeting on curriculum revisions last semester. Many here seem to want to develop multimedia as its own silo, whereas I see it as cross-subject/discipline/platform. I figure it will take t...

Scott · Scott

Each of the professional majors (news-editorial, magazine, electronic media, advertising and public relations) operate largely within its own silo, making cross-training difficult. News-editorial, once the core of the journalism program, suffers from dwindling student participation. T...

Dave Bostwick

The print program at Baker University has been very successful and is the core of the department. The publication has a 90 percent readership rate on campus. Because the print edition receives so much attention and requires so much of students' time, it is often difficult to make some students reali...

Jane · Jane

Well. Despite the things that I think work well, my own opinion is that college and curricular structure can impede new developments. With print and electronic media in separate departments, under separate directors, it's difficult to see where multimedia courses should be taught. Team teachin...

rbraseth · rbraseth

We need to all get along. We need to stop the worthless discussions about which media is better. We need to take a look at how to best prepare our students for the world they will face when they leave us. We need to help build the journalism of the future rather than sit on the sidelines and pine about the day...

jmcpherson · jmcpherson

Though we tend to have pretty good writers, we don't have much in terms of technology. There is some video and editing equipment, to which students generally have access only if they're in related courses. We are now in the process of trying to figure out what technology we should add, when we can, and h...

Mindy · Mindy

I'll make this brief, because I'm posting primarily to show that if you START A NEW TOPIC here in this thread, you can put your school's name in the topic title. This will make the topic easier to read and easier to respond to. If you choose to REPLY to someone else's topic, then your school will be buried....

Charlotte · Charlotte

Not all our students in Television Studies are good writers. (We have two tracks, production and broadcast). Even some students who aspire to be television journalists need to improve their writing, and this is especially true at a time when scriptwriting a three-minute package is far from suffic...

Topic		Started By	Replies	Views	Last Post
	what needs work at University of San Francisco (Preview) This is my second attempt at posting this so here's hoping it goes through... Problems: Only two of the three journalism minor faculty teach journalism. We love our third member (a digital cultures scholar hired as a result of a PhD-only tenure-track journalism faculty search), but we didn't gain a...	Teresa	0	973	Feb 11, 2008 by Teresa
	Palm Beach Atlantic (Preview) Where to start with our needs? PBA is a great small school with a lot of heart and a few eager students. Our challenges come from the top down. First off, the president of the university doesn't really trust student publications (students want to cover things like campus crime, not one of his favorite t...	denise	0	529	Feb 11, 2008 by denise
	What needs work at Maryland (Preview) What needs work? To put it bluntly, our faculty. We have very few faculty members who can tell stories in print, on TV/radio and online. We have two online specialists and rely on adjuncts to deliver other high-techcourses. On the full-time faculty, everyone has his or her area of expertise and seems...	PennnyFuchs	0	456	Feb 10, 2008 by PennnyFuchs
	More from American University (Preview) I'm tempted to just write "What Stephanie said" for all of these, but I won't ... One of the hard truths that we faculty have had to confront is that each of us is at a totally different place with our own knowledge of technology and comfort with using / teaching it. Since most of us come from pro...	angiechuang	0	485	Feb 8, 2008 by angiechuang
	What needs work at UW-River Falls (Preview) I'm echoing others' comments. Not enough equipment, not enough knowledge on the part of most of the faculty although to be fair we're receptive to change--it's just hard to find time and assistance necessary to learn some of the new equipment, software, techniques, etc. Our IT people are coopera...	jimmynan	0	998	Feb 8, 2008 by jimmynan
	Room for improvement at UW-Madison (graduate) (Preview) At the graduate level, I dont see a lot of the journalism professors incorporating multimedia into their curriculum in any kind of a significant manner, though students are encouraged to add digital accompaniments to their class projects. Challenges here include time in the classroom (i.e. ther...	Robinson	1	988	Feb 8, 2008 by aherrin
	What's down at UW-Madison (Preview) We continue to face funding troubles. It's a bleak time in public higher education and we feel it in faculty numbers, student access to classes, multimedia equipment and training opportunities. We also have varying interest in truly implementing converged courses. Finally, as much as peopl...	kbculver	0	453	Feb 6, 2008 by kbculver
	What needs work at San Francisco State University... (Preview) We need more training. Most of our faculty are experienced professionals but we left newsrooms 5, 10, 20 years ago. We have little experience with modern newsgathering and reporting techniques. We need more communication with the outside world. We're an insular department -- we don't even talk to...	RKanigel	0	466	Feb 6, 2008 by RKanigel
	What needs work at Pacific Lutheran University (Preview) Like everyone else in this string, more money would make our jobs easier ... but with more money comes the question: on what do we spend it? More equipment? What equipment? More faculty? What expertise? Its imperative that future journalists can tell a good story well, make sound ethical decision a...	Joanne M. Lisosky	0	467	Feb 4, 2008 by Joanne M. Lisosky
	What needs work at UTPA (Preview) We need more training in technology, despite a desire to teach it. We need more journalism-only computer labs (as it is, we have to share two, 30-computer labs with the rest of the College of Arts and Humanities). We're lucky to have a fair amount of software, but we need to be able to offer it just to our s...	donnapaz	0	574	Feb 3, 2008 by donnapaz
	What Needs Work at Michigan State equipment training faculty resistance (Preview) MSU is wrestling with many things that the rest of you mentioned. The biggest obstacles: lack of equipment or money to buy equipment, faculty resistance, lack of experience among faculty members in new technology and new media, lack of training for faculty to make them comfortable teaching new thi...	Sue	0	643	Jan 31, 2008 by Sue
	What needs work at Webster (Preview) I have to get changes through the curriculum committee, and assuming that I am successful, I have to convince colleagues AND students that this is an area worthy of embracing. I have students who turn to the Internet for everything--they don't even consider looking up a number in the phone book. But w...	Eileen	0	466	Jan 30, 2008 by Eileen
	What Needs Work at AU (Preview) Here I am, as promised. Apart from a lack of faculty cohesion, I see other problems: I think we talk a good multimedia talk with our students, especially our undergraduates, but we don't act on it. I wish the undergraduates had the opportunity to work on the Observer, or create their own magazine in its...	snazzblake	0	454	Jan 30, 2008 by snazzblake
	What Needs Work at UMass? (Preview) Like many place, we face the silo problem here. One faculty member actually used the term during a faculty meeting on curriculum revisions last semester. Many here seem to want to develop multimedia as its own silo, whereas I see it as cross-subject/discipline/platform. I figure it will take t...	stevefox	0	489	Jan 29, 2008 by stevefox
	Needs Work at the University of Oregon (Preview) Each of the professional majors (news-editorial, magazine, electronic media, advertising and public relations) operate largely within its own silo, making cross-training difficult. News-editorial, once the core of the journalism program, suffers from dwindling student participation. T...	Scott	0	462	Jan 29, 2008 by Scott
	Needs work at Baker U. (Preview) The print program at Baker University has been very successful and is the core of the department. The publication has a 90 percent readership rate on campus. Because the print edition receives so much attention and requires so much of students' time, it is often difficult to make some students reali...	Dave Bostwick	0	412	Jan 29, 2008 by Dave Bostwick
	Needs improvement (Preview) Well. Despite the things that I think work well, my own opinion is that college and curricular structure can impede new developments. With print and electronic media in separate departments, under separate directors, it's difficult to see where multimedia courses should be taught. Team teachin...	Jane	0	462	Jan 28, 2008 by Jane
	The University of Mississippi needs to..... (Preview) We need to all get along. We need to stop the worthless discussions about which media is better. We need to take a look at how to best prepare our students for the world they will face when they leave us. We need to help build the journalism of the future rather than sit on the sidelines and pine about the day...	rbraseth	1	524	Jan 28, 2008 by Mindy
	Whitworth University needs (Preview) Though we tend to have pretty good writers, we don't have much in terms of technology. There is some video and editing equipment, to which students generally have access only if they're in related courses. We are now in the process of trying to figure out what technology we should add, when we can, and h...	jmcpherson	0	432	Jan 26, 2008 by jmcpherson
	Needs work at the University of Florida convergence journalism print online broadcast (Preview) I'll make this brief, because I'm posting primarily to show that if you START A NEW TOPIC here in this thread, you can put your school's name in the topic title. This will make the topic easier to read and easier to respond to. If you choose to REPLY to someone else's topic, then your school will be buried....	Mindy	0	520	Jan 26, 2008 by Mindy
	What Needs Work at Lyndon State (Preview) Not all our students in Television Studies are good writers. (We have two tracks, production and broadcast). Even some students who aspire to be television journalists need to improve their writing, and this is especially true at a time when scriptwriting a three-minute package is far from suffic...	Charlotte	1	448	Jan 25, 2008 by jmcpherson
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