Syllabus

JOURNALISM 506.001

Topics in Journalism Education

Spring 1997

Course Overview

The National Education Summit received much notoriety in the spring of 1996 when leaders from America's business sector and governors from 42 states gathered to contemplate all that ails education in the United States. Among the strongest recommendations made in the summit's policy statement was a call for increased use of technology in schools: "We are convinced that technology, if applied thoughtfully and well integrated into a curriculum, can be utilized as a helpful tool to assist student learning and to provide access to valuable information." This, too, could serve as a policy statement for this course.

The goal of Journalism 506, Topics in Journalism Education, is to help you as a teacher become better able to utilize the Internet in your classrooms. But this course should not be mistaken as simply being another version of "Internet for Dummies". This course will strive to give teachers of language arts not only the ability to design, build and maintain webpages for the purpose of displaying student work. More importantly, this course will aim to give teachers a framework for integrating computer-mediated communication into their classrooms. I believe strongly that teaching students journalistic skills of inquiry and investigation can provide this framework, enabling educators to take advantage of rapidly evolving technology for the purpose of making our students better writers, better communicators.

Theoretical Framework

Preparing K-12 students to become journalists is not an objective of Journalism 506. Rather, the ultimate intent of this course is to aid teachers in creating language arts classrooms that help students utilize technology to better relate to the world around them. One can think of this classroom as "James Moffett Goes High Tech" because the theoretical framework for this course is very much rooted in the merging of new technology into the language arts classroom Moffett has advocated for the past three decades. Moffett believes that the key to teaching students how to use language well -- to teach them how to become strong writers -- is to provide authentic writing tasks directed toward and consumed by a real audience. Yet, teachers remain the primary audience for most student writing.

"If students produce language only for the teacher," according to Moffett, "they may lack motivation or they may substitute grades and pleasing the teacher for authentic reasons to talk and write. Lack of authentic audience is in fact a major cause of school language difficulty. ... Other human resources have to be called on as well, inside and outside the classroom." The Internet offers authentic audiences that no educator could have envisioned being able to access even 10 years ago. This course and the Nevada on-line student newspaper project will give K-12 students the ability to reach that audience.

In addition, integrating journalistic skills into language arts curriculum will give teachers a roadmap for bringing Moffett's Three I's -- Individualization, Integration and Interaction -- into the classroom. In fact, adding a fourth "I", Inquiry, into Moffett's model will ensure K-12 students will possess the critical-thinking and communication skills neccesary to survive and thrive in our information age.

Course Format (This is coming soon.)

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University of Nevada, Reno
Please direct questions to: Larry Baden (baden@scs.unr.edu)
URL of this document: http://www.unr.edu/sb204/journ506/syllabus.html
Created by: Craig Edwards