J198: Start your engines

Part of a continuing series of posts about JOUR 198, our first foray in multimedia reporting here at Lehigh …

New semester starts tomorrow here at Lehigh. Courses for this semester are COMM 100 Media & Society, the second semester in a row for this course, and JOUR 198 Multimedia Reporting.

It’s the latter course that has me excited as well as a little nervous. I’ve been planning and thinking through this course for a few months, but as I’ve been tweaking the syllabus the past few weeks I’ve had to come to grips with what I don’t know. Specifically, the baseline skill levels of the students entering the course, because it really affects what direction all of this takes.

I go back and forth on on whether I’m being too ambitious or not pushing them enough. In the end, I just don’t know. I have to get my hands in the dirt with this group and figure it out, and that work starts tomorrow. I know they can tell stories because they’ve been doing that. But there are always differing levels of ease in understanding the common threads in telling stories in narrative writing versus multimedia platforms. There’s always that light bulb moment in their head. The central question as it relates to any new platform we’ll be learning (audio, video, photo) is how fast we can turn that bulb on. And, of course, most of them have never held a video camera in their hand.

This will be a real learning semester for me. I’ve taught something like this course before, so I know it’s doable, but what I need to learn is where Lehigh students are and listen to them. One thing I do know is they’re good students and fast learners. I continue to be impressed with the high achievement level I observe in Lehigh students.

My syllabus has a built in note that the class is subject to revision. I have had classes like that due to their experimental nature, and I hate that. I’m a planner. As a student I needed to build my schedule and tasks around what was expected of me. So I’m sensitive that too much in-semester change would be a big problem; some revisions I might wait to make until J198 2.0, some I might adopt in term.

And then there are the millions of brainstorms that always seem to hit right as we’re entering the fray, such as a great conversation I had with fellow new mediaphiles Bob Britten and Jen Reeves on Facebook about journalistic uses of Foursquare, which I’ve been messing around with the past couple weeks. Together we did a mini-crowdsource discussion of ways to use Foursquare in the classroom, which is a blog post in itself that I’ll get to this week.

In truth it’s probably too much to squeeze stuff like Foursquare journalism into this term, if for no other reason than I don’t even know how many of my students have a smartphone. But the problem is that once I get these ideas churning in my brain I can’t help but wonder if I’m not giving the students my best if I don’t at least make it an option to tap into the scary world that is my brain on new media.

But, anyhow, we set sail tomorrow. I’ll be blogging it out and posting links to things as we go so people can follow the progress on Twitter and such.