This list is not going to surprise anyone, I'm sure. But to get right down to brass tacks, we might as well look these square in the face (mm, mixing my metaphors):
It's hard to teach skills such as audio gathering, photojournalism and video shooting if you lack recorders, cameras, microphones, etc. Or if your stuff is too old. I went to plug a video camera into a TV set that was sitting in my classroom and discovered that the TV was so old, it did not have ANY connectors except a co-ax cable! I haven't seen a TV like that since about 1995!
Sometimes we have great labs and computers, but we lack the current software. Sometimes that is NOT a money issue but rather an IT issues. The IT people tell the professors that you cannot have Audacity because it is not made by Microsoft, for example. It does not come with a support contract. You are not permitted to install software in your lab, and the IT guy refuses to install it for you.
Some schools have badly outdated labs and computers.
I hear more and more that a school has managed to get the equipment AND update the labs -- but no one has spent one red cent on teaching the faculty how to use any of the new toys. At least if you have the stuff, you can try to teach yourself, using online tutorials and books. But then -- where do you find the time to teach yourself?
Understandably, some educators are concerned that if they self-teach willy-nilly, they might teach themselves "the wrong thing" and then embarrass themselves in front of the class. Others assume it will be quite frustrating and maybe come to nothing if they try to learn something completely new -- I often hear this from the older newspaper practitioners in regards to audio. They are not sure where to begin, and that is a big roadblock that prevents them from even getting started!
Amen! I'd also add one note about instructors' fears/frustrations. It's challenging enough on top of one's regular duties to learn new technology. The thought that what one has learned will be quickly outdated makes one even more hesitant to take the plunge (and, in regard to Mindi's first points, perhaps makes the institution even more unwilling to invest in equipment and training).
You're not wrong, Jim, but what a dead end that is -- we can't invest time in learning because we will always still need to learn something new after that? Well, yeah.
I think the fear part is also a fear of doing it badly, or not managing to learn it at all, and then maybe you'll lose face. No one wants that to happen to him- or herself.
While I don't deny the fear of doing something badly--adding to my oh-so-long list of such things--perhaps I expressed the other part poorly (see, one more thing on the list).
The concern I was trying to express was that time is limited, despite the obvious need to keep learning new things to keep my six or seven classes a year relevant, to be of as much use as possible to the student newspaper I advise, and to keep up with academic research expectations. The fear (admittedly perhaps an unjustified one--my technophobia level may be higher than that of others) is that a couple of years new skills learned will be largely irrelevant, and that the time and money spent learning those skills could have been better spent on learning other things that are then more useful to students (and which I didn't learn, because I made the wrong guess about how best to spend my time and money).
Having said all that, I'm greatly looking forward to what I'll learn in a this program for my personal benefit and that of my current students, and have already bookmarked Mindi's excellent Web site for future use.
I agree wholeheartedly with everything you said in this post. You can't teach students to tell stories on video if you can't let them use cameras because there are not enough. You can't expect instructors to feel comfortable teaching a subject they know nothing about. You have to provide them with training. You have to make the training a priority.
__________________
Sue Burzynski Bullard
Visiting Editor-in-Residence
School of Journalism
Michigan State University
303 Comm Arts Bldg.
East Lansing, MI 48824-1212
OFFICE: 517-353-5425
FAX: 517-355-7710
CELL: 248-842-3992
bullar17@msu.edu
While our department does not have the equipment, we've found resources on campus, places that rent out cameras, so we're using this stop-gap method until we have more equipment on hand. I've heard some schools are requiring students to have a camera coming into j school. Anyone on this listserve doing that? A good camera can be had for a few hundred dollars, and financial aid is available. We're thinking of it...
__________________
Susan M. Knight
Assistant Professor
Faculty Mentor/Curriculum Coordinator
Journalism Department
University of Arizona
520-621-3191
smknight@email.arizona.edu
We have not talked about requiring a camera, but we are talking (continually) about requiring a laptop, because our labs are just too full with classes. We would not eliminate the labs, but we (well, SOME of us) want to move the beginner writing and reporting classes OUT of the labs so the kids who need access to higher-end software can get in there and use it.
