PR Studies

Teaching social media

I'm confused. There's always more we can and should be teaching students, but social media? What does a digital native, born close to 1990, need to learn from a digital immigrant who graduated before the IBM PC was launched in the UK, and who wrote magazine articles back in the 1980s about how businesses were adopting a new communications device, the fax machine? The telephone has been the most important communications device for PR practitioners for the last century - but we don't teach students how to communicate by phone. Perhaps we should.

So I asked Natalie Smith to help me. She's just completed her first year and is now on a placement at Wolfstar, and I'll be using her list to guide me next year.

But note how Natalie's learning through doing. It might be self-defeating for a university lecturer to admit it, but there's something rather passive about only learning through teaching. Besides, here's a list of some of the things I might have taught in the past that would seem useless today: WordPerfect for DOS; desktop publishing; using a scanner; network protocols; research using online databases; using bulletin boards; CB radio...

It helps to distinguish between teaching principles - which shouldn't change - and teaching practice, which can date very rapidly. And to realise in all humility that it matters less what you teach than what students learn.

Comments

Teaching social media

I'm confused. There's always more we can and should be teaching students, but social media? What does a digital native, born close to 1990, need to learn from a digital immigrant who graduated before the IBM PC was launched in the UK, and who wrote magazine articles back in the 1980s about how businesses were adopting a new communications device, the fax machine? The telephone has been the most important communications device for PR practitioners for the last century - but we don't teach students how to communicate by phone. Perhaps we should.

So I asked Natalie Smith to help me. She's just completed her first year and is now on a placement at Wolfstar, and I'll be using her list to guide me next year.

But note how Natalie's learning through doing. It might be self-defeating for a university lecturer to admit it, but there's something rather passive about only learning through teaching. Besides, here's a list of some of the things I might have taught in the past that would seem useless today: WordPerfect for DOS; desktop publishing; using a scanner; network protocols; research using online databases; using bulletin boards; CB radio...

It helps to distinguish between teaching principles - which shouldn't change - and teaching practice, which can date very rapidly. And to realise in all humility that it matters less what you teach than what students learn.