Books
Final Paper-Media Content Analysis
Final Paper-Rubric
Final Paper-Three Benchmarks
History of Popular Music Slideshow
Intro to Mass Media - Combined OER
Magazines
Media Issues (Representation, Laws, Regs, Politics, and Democracy)
Movies
Movies
Movies Slideshow
New Media
Newspapers and Journalism
Overview and Introduction
Popular Music
Radio
Video Games
Introduction to Mass Media Hybrid Text
Overview
This hybrid text seeks to introduce students to mass media and communications by combining two existing OER resources -- "Understanding Media and Culture: An Introduction to Mass Communication" a 750-page book from 2016 from the University of Minnesota Libraries and Mark Poepsel's 100-page book "Media, Society, Culture, and You" from 2017 -- into a single 400-page textbook (50 of which are bibliographic references), to form a comprehensive yet accessible introductory level text that teachers and students alike can augment and update with contemporary examples.
Full Text and Overview
By combining the pertinent sections of each text and rearranging the order to embed some of the module-related "issues" into each section (rather than keeping many of the "media issues" a separate section as some texts do), this hybrid text encourages each professor (and by extension their students) to add relevant contemporary examples. Furthermore, the hybrid text front-loads some of these issues, that then play out over the ensuing discussions of each medium.
It also includes a section of issues that are pertinent to all media, such as cultural representation, laws, regulations, politics, and democracy.
The text (and accompanying Final Paper idea, adapted from Jennifer Bauer and Gordon Curry's) was combined with the following SLOs in mind:
- Identify themes and messages across multiple mass media.
- Analyze a mass media piece based on its formal characteristics.
- Explain some of the objectives of different theories and major players in the media.
- Apply critical theories to analyze media arts in critical observation, writing, and discussion.
- Make aesthetic judgments using your own standards and politics.
This hybrid text seeks to introduce students to mass media and communications by combining two existing OER resources -- "Understanding Media and Culture: An Introduction to Mass Communication" a 750-page book from 2016 from the University of Minnesota Libraries and Mark Poepsel's 100-page book "Media, Society, Culture, and You" from 2017 -- into a single 400-page textbook (50 of which are bibliographic references), to form a comprehensive yet accessible introductory level text that teachers and students alike can augment and update with contemporary examples.
Setting the Stage: What is Mass Media and why does it matter?
Provides an overview of Mass Media, common culture, and main methodologies as a way to contextualize the rest of the text's deeper coverage of individual media types.
Internet and New Media
By starting with the media that is most prevalent in students' lives, and due to its ubiquity is often taken for granted, the student is thrust into a tangible consideration of the ways in which "the medium is (indeed) the message."
Newspapers and Journalism
Due to the prevalence of obtaining news via social media and/or various news aggregators that either deliver stories out of context or narrow one's exposure due to algorithms, and the increased drive for media literacy in light of these "new media" delivery methods, introducing students to journalism and newspapers as the next module has proven beneficial.
Books
Other suggested resources include:
TED overview of Books: (4mins) -- www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YqYtdPUis4
E-Books vs Physical Books:
Why Physical Books Still Outsell e-Books (CNBC-6mins) www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Em-U9onvGI
(Cull the stats and opinion from this video; update the stats for 2022, for slides)
Why Borders Failed and Barnes & Noble Survived (NPR - 3mins)
https://www.npr.org/2011/07/19/138514209/why-borders-failed-while-barnes-and-noble-survived
Why Indy Bookstores? (NPR-3mins)
Graphic Novels:
History of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xw3N2GIUZc (6minutes)
Stan Lee on Banned Books Week: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCu9hs73kb0 (2 minutes)
Magazines
From general interest to niche, and from print (and mailed) to online versions, the expansion, contraction, and possble rebirth of magazines echoes the trajectory of its print counterparts (books and newspapers).
Popular & Recorded Music
The accompanying slideshow is a representation of what you can ask students to create based on the readings to synthesize the material, or something you can create to preface or review the readings with them.
Radio
Controlling the airwaves meant much more than ruling the charts...
Movies
The slideshow is another example of what students can create to synthesize and share the material, or what the instructor can use to preface or review the material.
Television
TV is everywhere and "on the go" now showing convergence not only within a medium, but how technology is blurring the boundary between television and movies, just as it has shifted our understabnding of what "radio" is. Also, the lack of "real time" and "same space" has shifted the idea of communal experience... by this module students should be personally reinforcing the ideas of how media and our use of it has not only shifted global and poltical considerations, but also personal and interpersonal considerations.
Digital Gaming
Creating and living in a digital world. By placing this module here, it is chronological, but it also rounds out the trajectory of the course for our mosty highly interactive media (new media and digital gaming). A case could be made for including Digital Gaming as the third module, but by including it here, it brings in the idea of narrative of movies and tv, as well as the shift in communcal spaces.
Advertising and PR
And in the penultimate module, Advertising and PR, we also round out the trajectory of ubiquitous persences, and since it is the most tangibly associated with societal issues and concerns, it makes a good lead-in to the remaining "Issues" covered in the final module.
Media Issues
Along the way, the previous modules have shown you medium-specific or medium-related issues that pertain to various media; in addition, issues of representation, laws, regulations, politics, and democracy persist across all media. A case could be made for this to come earlier in the semester, and this textbook seeks to integrates some of the other issues more distinctly along the way, while also highlighting some of the over-arching ones here.
Along the way, the previous modules have shown you medium-specific or medium-related issues that pertain to various media. In addition, as you will see in this module, issues of representation, laws, regulations, politics, and democracy persist across all media.
Media Coverage Assignment
I have used this as an earlier in the semester assignment as well, after newspapers and journalism, but it could also go after television, or before digital gaming depending on the flow and/or length of your semester.
This assignment challenges you to use your critical thinking skills to analyze and evaluate media coverage of a recent event or issue. You will examine several different media sources and evaluate the media coverage as a whole.