Everyone talks about how social media is changing everything. Media, professional networking, credibility - you name it. Sometimes education is thrown into the mix, but I’ll have to admit that even I never thought about this new classroom I’ll describe here.
Thanks to Dr. Alex Halavais who posted a link the link through Twitter (@halavais), I found this post on Media Shift about what NYU’s very respected journalism school was doing in their teaching of social media in the newsroom. The post was by NYU student Alana Taylor.
And man, it was not pretty for NYU.
This represents a new classroom, where once-private teacher evaluations & complaints are more than public … especially when they are endorsed as a “special report” on a very credible Web site.
(sidenote, wonder what Dr. Jay Rosen, who teaches at NYU & writes PressThink, has to say about this?)
In all these days of talking about consumer-generated content and the increased level of credibility for “someone like me” that you’ve never even met has in recommending or rejecting something (Yelp, Amazon reviews, etc.), it never occurred to me that students could or would use it as a place to so one-sidedly air their grievances publicly about a class or professor. Never.
Now, mind you, I knew that this happens in spaces like RateMyProfessor or similar sites & I was fine with that.
But something about Alana’s tirade against her professor, her classes & the NYU journalism program as a whole really struck a nerve with me. Not to mention that her blog post happens to be published on a well-read media blog, hosted on the PBS server. I’d say that takes RateMyProfessor to the next level, wouldn’t you?
Gotta say I even I didn’t see that one coming.
In the beginning of the semester, especially in a newly developed elective course, it can be challenging to communicate the course to students. Assignments or projects may seem to lack the level of guidance presented in other classes, the professor may seem disorganized - lots of things can happen. Sometimes the professor really is disorganized, and sometimes it just takes time for the students to “get it.”
Traditionally, student complaints begin with adult and professional one-on-one discussions with the professor in office hours. If the complaint is not resolved, it continues up the chain of academic command.
This Media Shift/Alana Taylor method, however, is worrisome for so many different reasons in my view. Maybe when I get tenure, I’ll go into them all.
So anyway. Read that post if you haven’t already. And don’t forget to look at the comments.