Article Reprint discusses Media Studies in Education

The following is an article I came across that I found of interest.

This article discusses an ongoing debate as to the validity of Media Studies in University environments. As someone who is currently immersed in a course of Media Studies at the New School (NYC), I can assure you that my classes are not only engaging, but deal in the most current, relevant and revolutionary of subject matter and instruction. My curriculum is focused on balancing the history and evolution of Media and it’s various theorists and theories as well as a great infusion of the most cutting edge advances in the industries that have grown from those.

Of course, teaching institutions vary greatly but my program has been around a long while and the courses are taught by learned professionals in their fields.

Enjoy and as always, your comments are welcome! Thanks to Social Media Mind on Twitter for leading me to this….

In defence of media studies

How do we judge if a subject is easy or difficult? Condemnation of media studies reflects a fundamental confusion about its aims

David Buckingham
Saturday August 22 2009
guardian.co.uk

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/aug/22/media-studies

It’s unfortunate for teachers and students that the exam results always come out in the midsummer silly season. It seems to guarantee a flurry of tiresome political rhetoric, in which their hard work, and the realities of contemporary education, are entirely ignored.

This summer’s great education debate has seen frequent mention of media studies ? a subject that is now a byword for dumbing down. Media studies, we are told, is one of those soft options now being offered to the deluded students of our state schools; while the privately educated elite are being stretched by real, hard subjects like physics and maths. Admissions tutors at a few elite universities apparently look down on such soft options. And shadow education secretary Michael Gove has even proposed that schools be allocated more points in the league tables for hard subjects than easy ones.

If anything is a symptom of dumbing down, it is the willingness of politicians and pundits to pronounce on things they know nothing about. But why would they bother to find out? It is so much more convenient for them to represent media studies as just a matter of ignorant chavs sitting around watching telly.

Much of the discussion of media studies reflects a fundamental confusion about its aims. On the one hand, it is chided for being not vocational enough: after all, media studies GCSE isn’t going to get you a job in the BBC. Yet on the other, it is condemned for not being academic enough: it is, quite hilariously, a Mickey Mouse subject.

But how might these arguments apply to other subjects? Do we judge the value of English degrees on whether they equip students to become professional literary critics? In fact, the employment rate of media studies graduates is higher than in most other humanities and social science subjects; and most of them are getting jobs in media-related professions, however precarious they may be.

The charge of being insufficiently academic is one that media studies students ? who routinely struggle with the complexities of social and cultural theory ? would find quite ridiculous. The academic study of the media dates back more than 80 years, and there is a vast body of scholarship on the sociological, psychological, cultural and economic dimensions of the media.

Indeed, there are many academics researching and teaching about the media at Oxford and Cambridge, and at most leading “old” universities. Meanwhile, competition for places on media studies degrees is intense, with required grades often much higher than for other subjects.

How do we judge whether a subject is easy or difficult? Is art difficult? For some it is as easy as breathing, but for others it is something they will always struggle to master. For some, maths must seem like a soft option, while for others it will forever remain a closed book.

The suspicion of media studies is very similar to that which greeted sociology in the 1960s, or English literature in the 1920s. Then, the suggestion that young people might study books in their native language rather than just in ancient Greek and Latin was little short of scandalous.

Now, the idea that young people might study the media of modern communication seems equally scandalous. Newspapers have been around for more than 250 years, the cinema for more than 100 and television for more than 60. Perish the thought that schools should recognise, and interrogate, their existence.

This suspicion is fuelled by some who work in the media, but who seem to regard what they do as somehow unworthy of serious critical attention. Or perhaps they find such attention threatening?

By all means let’s have a serious debate about how we teach media studies, and what it can achieve. But that debate needs to be based on more than ignorance and narrow-minded prejudices about modern culture.

guardian.co.uk Copyright (c) Guardian News and Media Limited. 2009
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Another Tip from Mutt Media NY

5. Subscribe to RSS feeds in your professional field. This will keep you on top of the latest trends, articles and expose you to contacts you didn’t have before.

This is a free service that brings the entire web to your personal computer. Instead of searching out your favorite blogs and news feeds, they will be fed directly into your Reader Account and at your fingertips when you need them. You will be surprised how many people are out there sharing ideas, bartering and feeding off of the World Wide Web of creativity.

You will find an option to subscribe to an RSS feed on virtually all Blogs that you visit. Now that I’ve brought this up, you will notice and look for them even more, right?

A short primer on RSS or, as they are often called, Web Feeds.

RSS (Real Simple Syndication) is a technology that enables web browsers to read content as text. What does this mean for the blogger? Well, that his content will be more easily picked up by search engines and easier to find by the rest of us.

How is an RSS Feed useful? Well, I’ll use myself as an example….My interests (to name a few) are online media, fashion, gardening, and movies. In the online world, lots of people are blogging, but let’s say I’ve found a few that give me great insights and information written in a style that I like. Rather than having to visit each site individually and hope they’ve posted something new, I can subscribe to their feed and whenever they provide new content, it will be delivered straight to my Reader. This way, I can, at my leisure, pop in and read without having to go on a labor-intensive search mission. You can subscribe to as many news feeds as you like; they are only limited by how much news you’d like to get. Gone are the days of bookmarking! All posts will be sent to you within moments.

Think of your News Feed as getting information delivered right to your front door (like a newspaper), only the great thing is that it only contains the news you have expressed an interest in reading! You can log into many of these from any computer so you never have to be completely out of touch, even on vacation. If this option sounds good to you, you’ll want to look for a web-based news feed. Just a few are Google Reader, News Gator and Bloglines.

There are many utilities out there to deliver your news feed right to your computor, too. Some are NetNewsWire (for Mac users), and SharpReader.

So, go forth and subscribe. You can start with Mutt Media! Just click on the tab at the top of this page that says “RSS” after you select and set up your newsreader.

This has been your Daily Bone
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