[Air-l] classroom discussion of war

[Annette Markham]

A note from the classroom:

Yesterday, I had an excellent discussion with my undergraduate students 
about the war  (communication department).  We agreed at the outset that we 
were not going to rehash the debates we've been having; that we would 
instead focus on how internet technologies influence how we make sense of 
this war.

Only two students had discussed the war in other courses.  When we 
finished, they were grateful that they got to talk about it, especially 
because we focused on it in a different way than they have been in 
conversations with friends and family.

We talked at length about blogging and the differences between mainstream 
news and independent journalism, in terms of perceived credibility and 
truth value.  We looked at various types of news sites, from the Forbes 
"top five war blogs," to some of the anti-war blog sites that I've gathered 
from previous AOIR postings, to those blogs that look more like official 
news sites than personal blogs.  They were really into this exercise; they 
identified and reflected on their criteria for judging the credibility of 
various media.  They were surprised at their own hasty judgments of 
non-mainstream news.  After looking at news sources from other countries, 
they talked at length about gatekeeping and the construction of reality by 
the media.

All in all, a really good experience for all of us, especially as it 
brought potent real-life meaning to many basic communication concepts most 
often discussed in fairly abstract terms.

Thanks to those of you who are supplying all the news sources to this list; 
it's a direct help to me and my students.  I encourage us to continue 
discussing these issues in our classrooms; these are vital discussions, 
whether or not our students appear to understand that right now.

Annette

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Annette N. Markham, Ph D
Assistant Professor
Department of Communication
University of Illinois at Chicago
1007 W. Harrison St. m/c 132
Chicago, IL  60607-7137
312 . 413 . 2124
amarkham at uic.edu
http://ascend.comm.uic.edu/~amarkham/
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